..."Stop this, it's getting silly!" The normally reliable Darla reports that there's a 'new Symbian virus on the loose', quoting that 'Symantec announced today the presence of a new trojan attacking Symbian devices'. This is self-serving FUD gone mad.Click through to Symantec's web site and you see that the worldwide number of infections is between 0 and 49. Which probably means 1, or 0.0000001% of the number of S60 smartphones in the world. Hardly on the 'loose'. And, now that more people are educated about not installing programs they receive unsolicited, the number of infections might be up to, ooh, maybe as much as 10 by 2007. A truly terrifying 0.000001% of installed S60 devices and well worth blasting some self-publicity across the Symbian world.... Not.Shame on Symantec for trying to frighten the world with a press release. Relevant link: The truth about Symbian OS 'viruses'
Read on in the full article.
Why is this thing called a trojan? According to the Symantec website, it does not seem to do anything except preventing the phone to restart properly.
This looks to me like somebody somehow trashed an antivirus program so that it does not run properly anymore after install, and presto, whe have a new "trojan".
Very funny. If they want to scare me, can't they at least come up with a better story? More scary, perhaps?
Anyway, maybe somebody can enlighten me how a true trojan running on my smartphone would be useful for some attacker? He logs in to my phone, takes control of it, and ...? Make it part of a big botnet of hundreds of smartphones, attacking what, exactly? Sending spam mails? Sending premium SMS, download premium content and steal my money this way? Why, that needs no trojan, a simple non-trojan program can do this all on its own...
<q> "SymbOS.RommWar.A is a Trojan horse that affects the Symbian OS, which is used as the operating system for Nokia Series 60 cellular telephones." </q>
"S60 cellular telephones" -what happened to smartphones ?
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