Geeks On Site Warns of Cell Phone Viruses

May 4, 2011 - PRLog -- Rapid technology advances are sometimes followed by some negative effects. We are pretty sure that most of you never thought of cell phone viruses, or didn’t even think they exist. We, therefore, decided to write an article that will give you a closer look into this side of the world of our electronic ‘helpers’.

Having a cell phone today is very convenient. We are connected with our friends, we can call when being late for a date or a meeting, or we can call a friend to ‘pick us up’ after we had a drink or two. Even though sometimes we would like to turn it off, we have to admit that there are more positive sides of having a cell phone than negative. However, we have to be aware of a potential threat that’s been going on around but maybe never occurred to us – a cell phone virus.

A cell phone virus is basically very similar to viruses that were infecting our computers some years ago, which means that they are still not enough developed to harm your cell phone badly. However, they can cause you other kind of problems, so it is better to be aware of them and if our cell phone gets infected, detect them as soon as possible.

A cell phone virus is spread by MMS attachments, Bluetooth transfers, and Internet downloads, which is the most common way of getting your phone infected. The first virus, Cabir, occurred in 2004 and it only affected Bluetooth phones and spread between phones thanks to the same Bluetooth. Cabir worm had the aim to attack Symbian OS cell phones. It was designed to look for all available phones around using Bluetooth and installing itself on the first phone that it found, and from there the history repeats.

Viruses nowadays can be much more dangerous, since once on your cell phone, they can steal personal information (identity theft), make expensive calls over the victim’s account, or run down the battery really quick. Some months ago a virus called the ‘zombie virus’ attacked over one million phones in China in just a two-months period and caused that the contacts from infected users’ cell phones started receiving messages non-stop, which at the end collectively added up to $300,000 per day! This virus comes as part of a fake anti-virus application that people download for protection. Instead of its primary purpose of protecting cell phones, this virus, once downloaded launches a malicious virus. Again, once downloaded, the zombie virus steals the user’s information and sends it to the hackers. Once they get your information, they can misuse your cell phone and account.  

As bottom line, we can only recommend you not to download unofficial applications if you are not sure where or whom they come from; instead you should have an official anti-virus program that will protect your cell phone from viruses and worms! We should be aware that technology advance has negative aspects too, and for that we have to be well informed to prevent any possible damage. We hope we caught your attention with this text and that you will be more careful when downloading applications. Meanwhile, we’ll write more about this subject.

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