iPhone Hip

There is a new and nasty mobile phone worm at large. It is known as Yxes.A or Sexy View.

Yxes.A was written to attack Smartphones running the Symbian operating system. The worm infects the phone then searches the address book and attempts to send SMS messages to all the numbers it finds. In the body of the message it sends out there is a web address and if the person who received the message clicks on this then the phone connects and automatically downloads a copy of the worm onto their phone where upon the same action is taken. The worm can propagate across a great many phones very quickly.

Once installed in the mobile phones the worm gets up to more mischief. One of the things it does is search out the serial number of the phone and any information regarding the phone users’ contract, and transmits this information to another website. The recipients of this information can then potentially undertake various fraudulent activities.