14 DAY TRIAL // Even though only days ago the CommWarrior worm was believed to be able to spread globally shortly, as its spreading method is not spatially limited, it now seems that the worm is not all that dangerous.
According to the antivirus software producer Trendlabs, CommWarrior is a badly written malicious code, so it's not bound to cause much damage.
Along with these remarks, Trendlabs have lowered the virus threat from "critical" to "low".
The worm infects mobile phones running Symbian Series 60 and propagates via MMS, which is a first for smartphone viruses. Up until now, the mobile viruses could spread only through Bluetooth, which limited dramatically their spreading area, Bluetooth operating only on an up to 10 meters radius.
Since MMS is not spatially limited, most experts announced that CommWarrior poses the risk of a massive global infection.
Still, these affirmations proved to be hasty and, after a thorough study, the experts come up with a new verdict: even though, theoretically, the worm could propagate without any restriction, due to a bug in the MMS component of the code, this won't be feasible.
In an "ideal case", the worm would randomly transmit itself through MMS, but, since there are a lot of bugs in its code, the risk decreases dramatically.
The virus is already suspected to be active on several terminals, just because it disguised in a cracked game which was downloaded by unsuspecting users. So far, the infected phones are different Nokia models, such as 3650, 3600, 3660, 3620, 6600, 6620, 7610, 7650 and N-Gage, Panasonic X700, Sendo X and Siemens SX1.