The PDA Sneezes and the PC Catches a Mobile Virus

The smartphone viruses have started to make their way to the PC. This year has been particularly rich in mobile viruses, most of them designed for the Symbian platform, which is used on more than 50% of the smartphones.

The mobile viruses have gone past the "proof-of-concept" stage as more and more virus authors are switching from Windows viruses to cell phone ones.

In this context, the appearance of a virus which targets both the cell phones and the PCs was only a matter of time. And it seems that the time has come, F-Secure announcing the discovery of the first trojan which is capable of infecting both the Symbian platform and the Windows running PCs

F-Secure said that the new trojan, called Cardtrap A, works on Symbian and that it doesn’t have any "special powers", except the capability of infecting the PC as well. Cardtrap A copies on the phone’s memory card 2 PC worms: Win32/Padobot.Z and Win32/Rays.

Padobot.Z is copied in the autorun.inf file and it activates when the memory card is connected to the PC. Rays is copied on the PC with the name of System.exe and is far more dangerous that the first, because Windows doesn’t automatically run autorun.inf when the card is connected.

So from now on, be careful when you connect the smartphone to the PC, because you never know what damages your computer might suffer.


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