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Is your Phone Clean or Cleaned Out?
As if having a worry about viruses on computers wasn’t enough! These darned programs have now made it to our cell on, we are talking about viruses on mobile phones. Your mobile phone…. our mobile phones. And as we begin sharing data with other phones and our computers, the risk of infecting other devices also increases.
According to statistics, one in every 10 phones is now a smartphone capable of receiving and sending emails and surfing the internet. It has become easy and lucarative for hackers to attack mobile phones and the statistics indicates these dangers are just a real. From 2004 to 2007, the number of phone viruses has grown multifold. And it is thanks to the fact that mobile phones are now mirroring the computer operating system.
Security experts at Quick Heal Technologies say that a virus can infect a mobile phone in many ways like internet downloads, MMS(Multimedia Messaging service), emails and bluetooth transfers and so on. Viruses can appear as a disguised message like “game download” or “update to your phone’s system” or “ringtone” or even as some kind of alert. You may also get messages like a “file” is being beamed to your phone want to save it?” or “Trying to download certain image or a file want to save?”. These are the commonly seen messages when a virus like ‘common Warriror’ tries to infect a Bluetooth enabled mobile phone. Of Course, the correct thing to do in these cases is to refuse the file download.
Statistics from from Quick heal Technologies reveal that they have identified and added detection for about 400+ different variants of mobile threats excluding spam messages or phishing attacks.
As a user, it is important for you to know what damage a virus can do to your mobile phone. Experts say that a virus or specialised mobile malware can make your mobile phone unstable and even crash the OS occasionally. It can slow down the performance of the phone and also send an infected MMS to all contacts saved in the mobile phonebook. These malware can also increase your phone bill by sending unsolicated MMSes and SMSes. Recently, one users phone content was wiped clean after he downloaded a Trojan infected ringtone. Just like PC viruses, some mobile viruses are simply annoying and can do inane things like display a silly joke or change the application icons to some strange image. Some Viruses may affect in a more dangerous manner by freesing your phone completely.
Experts predict that this threat can get serious as hackers try to explore the “pranking for profit” way to earn something for their efforts. this can involve things like redirecting calls over different carrier or a service provider or premium calls that can lead to hefy phone bills. Attaching an image file to every MMS sent, which can again lead to increase in phone bill in another mischief that these viruses can play. Sending automatic multiple SMS for influencing the SMS poll rsults has also been reported by victims. “Vishing”, is when you’ll get a voice call that asks for information, faking the call by posing as a ligitimate business. A downloaded application may send information about your phone account to hackers and snoopware can capture your keypad clicks making the entire process very dangerous. Imagine the damage if you entered your bank details…