Another week another virus to scare the living SIM card out of your phone. Gavno pretends to be a patch file for a Symbian process... but obviously not coming directly from the Nokia Series 60 website, you'd be suspicious and not install it, wouldn't you. Thanks for the heads-up, Tarek.
More Anti-Common Sense Virus Arrives?
And, as usual (sigh), it's an anti-virus software vendor (SimWorks) that's spreading the fear and panic. Of course, I couldn't possibly comment on the rumours that it's the anti-virus vendors themselves that are writing these viruses. Oh no, that would be libellous.
And surely, any Symbian smartphone can easily be hard reset? What's all this about disabling it forever? The OS and apps are in ROM, for goodness sake...
I'm starting to see red... grr....
Steve Litchfield
It's not that I don't trust them as far as I can throw them, but I don't trust them. Again it's not a real virus, it's malware. And seemingly released and mentioned so that yet another company can shift an AV product on a market where the most reported virus isn't in the wild, it begs the thought is it just scaremongering.
Amendment: A small search on The Register finds this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/19/pocketpc_virus/ which should remind us all that AV vendors aren't above releasing press releases that allow facts to blur slightly. So as we can establish that Cabir and variants are proof of concept viruses, we also know from other vendors that they aren't in the wild and that the variants are usually only the same thing renamed.
As it is this new virus doesn't appear on the lists of the reputable av-vendors (F-secure & Symantec) that I use to check info on viruses. Therefore I have the suspicious feeling that Gavno may only be limited to the offices of the av vendor that spotted it.
You may think that, but I couldn't possibly comment...
Further to all this, I've put up some FACTS about Symbian OS viruses and a gazillion dollar challenge to virus writers over on 3-Lib. See The truth about viruses for Symbian OS.
Comments welcome!
Steve Litchfield
All this "virus" hype could also be treated as a mean of reducing the growing warez distribution in the S60 community. With more and more reports like this popping up, it should certainly make it less attractive to download warez. It wouldn't be the first time a pissed off programmer writes a virus/malware with the intention to hurt the warez community...