Virus battlers get cracking on mobiles

SOFTWARE companies are working on anti-virus software for mobile phones, fearing that handsets will become the next battleground in the war with computer hackers.

The world's first mobile phone virus, which emerged yesterday, appears to be the work of a shadowy group of European programmers known as 29a. News that 29a has perfected Cabir, a virus that attacks the Symbian operating system on the Nokia Series 60 phone and propagates itself using the phone's Bluetooth function, marks the end of a race between rival groups of virus writers to find weaknesses in phone systems.

The group has previously been responsible for a number of infamous world firsts including writing Rugrat, a sophisticated virus specifically targeted at the latest computers, and the first virus to attack Microsoft's Windows 2000 computer operating program.

The group, thought to consist of fewer than a dozen members, loves publicity. When it launched Rugrat, it linked its website to every news media site on the internet that had run the story.

'They definitely did this for the headlines,' said Graham Cluley of antivirus specialist Sophos. 'They are already publicising it on their websites and I suspect that a lot of the other groups will be very envious because there's a lot of rivalry between them, and because 29a did it first.'

Cabir is considered a relatively harmless prank but virus fighters say it is just the start of a trend that will mean mobiles have to be protected in the same way as desktop PCs.

'What this does show is that the computer-virus industry has turned its attention to smart phones and that is worrying,' said Kevin Hogan of security software provider Symantec. He added that his company has already begun work on anti-virus programs for mobile phones.

But Hogan and Cluley pointed out that the only phones likely to suffer from the attacks were the latest smartphones, which can access the internet.

'This is all depends on how smartphones are used,' said Hogan. 'When people were using the first PCs, they did not think they would be used for online banking, and the things that people are using phones for now had not been thought of two years ago.'