Pocket PCs face virus reality threat
Pocket PCs face virus reality threat
The first virus has been found that can infect the Windows Mobile Pocket PC platform and smart phones, sparking fear that PDAs and mobile phones are not as immune to infections as people first thought.
The virus is called WinCE4.Dust and was sent to anti-virus firms to reveal that these technologies are just as vulnerable to attacks as Windows operating systems on PCs.
The name of the person who wrote the virus is called "Ratter" and he is part of the 29A virus-writing group that also created Cabir, a virus that spread last month to mobile phones through Bluetooth.
The virus infects all of the .EXE files in the root directory of the Pocket PC device but does not do any permanent damage to the infected device.
At first it displays a dialog box asking if it can spread, and attaches itself to .exe. files if the user clicks OK.
However, it can only spread from one machine to another if users share infected programs.
It can infect devices that run PocketPC 2000, PocketPC 2002 and Pocket PC 2003. It is itself an ARM processor program and is 1520 bytes in size.
Executable files will be infected if they are an ARM processor and are more than 4KB in size. It writes itself to the last section of files and establishes an entry point at the beginning of the file.
Experts believe that this virus is nothing to worry about though, because they believe it is very easy for users to avoid accepting this virus into the system.
Security firms, however, have been planning to create solutions to counter act these potential attacks on PDAs and mobile phones, so this discovery creates more of a need than to cope with the reality of vulnerabilities.
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