1 MMS in 20 contains a virus

Fortinet reports in it’s december summary that 1 out of 20 MMS messages is infected by the CommWarrior.A or B virus. They say they detected this after installing antivirus software on an operator’s MMS Gateway in Germany. CommWarrior is a virus for the Symbian Series 60 / S60 platform and uses Bluetooth and MMS messages to distribute itself.

The virus can’t tell if another phone is also a S60 phone but the sheer number is interesting.  The description of the CommWarror virus above does not say how often an MMS is sent once a phone is infected. This would be important to know together with the percentage of S60 phones used and the number of MMS messages sent per day to draw a conclusion of how many mobiles are infected.

Nevertheless, it looks like it’s about time for virus protection on MMS servers. I wonder if operators charge their customers for MMS messages they filter out…

At the moment, the virus is still harmless if you care to think for a mintue before installing an unknown .sis file. However, I dread the day somebody finds out how to trick a phone’s operating system to execute code embedded in an image. Not that it did not happen on other systems (WMF…) before…