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Experts are warning that mobile phone viruses are the next wave of concern – and many are based on criminal intents.

An article in the Australian newspaper The Age, quotes Mikko Hypponen, director of anti-virus research at Finnish-based F-Secure Corp, who says mobile phones are fertile territory for cyber criminals to harvest millions from the unsuspecting. Criminals can take control of phones using botnets, without the knowledge of owners, and use their stored numbers to send SMS spam.

The article goes on to say:

Botnets are networks of PCs or phones that have been hijacked without the knowledge of their owners.

Once a botnet spammer has control of a phone, as is the case with PCs, they can become part of a global network, with each phone potentially sending thousands of SMS spam messages. Considering the cost of sending SMS messages, the financial implications of having your phone hijacked could be potentially far greater than having your PC used as a vector to spend spam.

Mr Hypponen says mobile phone users are at risk of being unjustly slapped with massive phone bills because of rogue botnet SMS spammers.

“If you look at the techniques used to make money with viruses, there are a couple,” he says . “The first one, which we started seeing about four years ago, is spamming. Most of the spam today is being fed from botnets created by viruses.

“What makes botnets really a risk is that you can create a network of tens of thousands of individual machines located all over the world under the command of one person. With that amount of computing power, you can do pretty much anything, including sending spam.”

The inhibiting factor of the cost of sending SMS messages will no longer be a deterrent to spammers, he says.

“Pretty soon now, I’m afraid we will start to see mobile phone malware infecting phones and then starting to send SMS messages to all the mobile phone numbers listed in the phonebooks of phones. That way the spammers can move the charges away from themselves to you and they also get access to the list in your phonebook.

“We haven’t seen this yet, but do you think it won’t happen?”

It appears we will soon be forced to implement security on our phones just as we do on our PCs.

“Right now there are a little over 200 mobile phone viruses, so it’s still very early days. We found the first mobile phone Trojan just six weeks ago, which works by sending SMS messages from the infected phones to a premium-rate number owned by the virus writer, where each SMS message costs around five euros ($A8.64).

“The virus writer is in Russia and it is only targeting Russian phones, but it is a very clear sign of things to come.”

In future, anti-virus products for phones will be mandatory, as they generally are for computers today.

If Mr Hypponen is right, we could be at the threshold of a burgeoning new anti-virus industry.

Technorati tags – mobile phone viruses | SMS crime

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