14 DAY TRIAL // The Spanish Police has detained a man under the suspicion of having created and spread a mobile phone virus. They say that more than 115, 000 mobile phones have been affected by the application.
The 28-year-old man is currently under arrest in Valencia after a seven month investigation has managed to gather proofs on his implication in the spreading of the mobile phone virus. Actually, he has been accused of being the creator of more than 20 versions of two worms, Cabir and Commwarrior. The malware contained references to the name of "Leslie" in the code, which is actually the fiancee of the arrested man. This might be one good proof amongst many others in order to show that he is indeed the author of the attacks, although the Police has not revealed other arguments that they hold against him.
These programs infect Symbian operating high-end phones. They come disguised as messages which seem to contain erotic images, sports information or virus protection software. Such deceiving programs are the common trick which manages to infect personal computers.
It seems that many mobile phone users do not perceive the risk that such viruses present to their handsets and most often do not protect the software on their devices through antivirus programs. For this reason, the mobile phone software industry proves to be highly vulnerable to attacks.
This is far from being the first attack on the softwares of mobile phones. The number of such incidents is far from the one found in the case of personal computers, but is still high and dangerous because of the vulnerable state that most handsets are at this time.
This specific virus has managed to product damages of millions of euros. Both mobile phone users and service providers have had to suffer from this infection.