Webupon

The company claimed this in their Security Threat Summary from the first quarter of 2009. In their summary, they claim that they have found the very first sms-virus. According to the summary, it also appeared that more and more exploits in social networks get abused. I’ll write more about that later in this article.

F-Secure describes the SymbOS/Yxe-worm as the most severe threat for the time coming. However, currently the worm is especially active in China. It is very possible that it will spread to other parts of the world, though.

The worm spreads itself via sms messages. Those messages contain misleading links to malicious sites who download the malware. Afterwards, the worm sends that message to all persons in your address book, so that they will get infected too.

“Sexy View, like it’s called, is the first sms-worm ever. It’s also the first mobile telephone-worm that circumvents the signature checks, meant to secure the latest smart-phones.” says F-Secures chief research officer Mike Hypponen.

“It’s seems that the writer of the worm wants to collect mobile phone numbers, to send spam in the future. Spam for mobile phones is currently a huge problem already in some parts of the world, and eventually we will all suffer from sms-spam.”

Like i said in the beginning of this article; more and more exploits in social networks like Facebook or MySpace get abused. “If you receive a message from a friend, you will most likely trust it.” says Hypponen. “And if people navigate to the ‘funny link’ and they have to ‘update their player’, they’re easily susceptible for attacks.”