A cracker going by the name 'HSE' has said
that he intends to bring fear and terror to the hearts of mobile
phone users everywhere "come hell or high waters".
HSE has
written a program in MS Visual Basic 5.0 that uses the public
"canals" in mobile phone networks in order to transmit huge volumes
of SMS messages to any number chosen. Similar to a denial of service
attack, the program has been imaginatively dubbed 'SMS Flooder'.
So far the damage seems to be restricted to Germany - there
is certainly a lot of chatter about the virus in German hacking and
cracking forums - apparently because the gateways through which the
virus is originally sent allow access to German networks only.
SMS Flooder was identified by Kaspersky's Lab. It classifies
the program as malicious code, not dangerous in itself and not
capable of replication.
However, there are fears that it
could lay the groundwork for a Trojan Horse style virus capable of
attacking mobile phones. Information on how to get rid of the virus
should be
here.
According to virus hunters at Sophos, the top ten, or most
reported, viruses in July were:
- VBS/Stages A 7.9%
- VBS/Kakworm 5.7%
- VBS/LoveLet-G 5.0%
- WM97/Marker-O 5.0%
- WM97/FF-F 4.3%
- WM97/Panther-B 4.3%
- XM97/Yawn-A 3.6%
- OF97/Jerk-I 2.9%
- WM97/Ethan 2.9%
- WM97/Marker-C 2.9%
- Others 55.5% ®
