Heavily-fortified Symbian smartphones have been hit by a virus spread by SMS. The code crashes the Messaging functionality, leaving the rest of the phone fully-functional, according to F-Secure. The Denial-of-Service attack, now entitled "SMS Curse of Silence", was discovered by Tobias Engel at the 25th Chaos Communication Congress, held on the 27th December 2008 until

Mobile Virology: Curse of Silence, a Symbian S60 SMS Exploit? Now when the platform is hacked and just when we thought we know practically everything there was to know about the 3rd edition of the S60 platform and new security system, I stumbled upon something really interesting. F-secure has just warned mobile phone users of a new worm which as is not S60 2nd Ed exclusive as usually and

It appears there might be a need for antivirus software on S60 phones after all. The F-Secure blog is reporting a unique problem where getting a specially formed SMS will turn your nice shiny smartphone into a less functional brick. Hopefully a ROM update will be availiable soon, but the blog details what to look for if it happens... More info here and a youtube video here Yet another reason why w...

Here's an odd one for you. Tobias Engel of the Chaos Communication Congress has discovered a rather nasty exploit that'll cause any Nokia S60 devices running versions 2.6, 2.8, 3.0 or 3.1 to stop receiving SMS and MMS messages. The "Curse of Silence," which has been independently verified by F-Secure, is triggered by sending an SMS that begins with an email address that's at least 3...

Can you imagine the response at the F-Secure offices? Woweeee, people might finally have a reason to buy our S60 app! A group in Germany by the name of Chaos Computer Club has discovered a pretty major vulnerability in the S60 OS that allows an attacker to disable incoming SMS ans MMS on a remote

Now when the platform is hacked and just when we thought we know practically everything there was to know about the 3rd edition of the S60 platform and new security system, I stumbled upon something really interesting. F-secure has just warned mobile phone users of a new worm which as is not S60 2nd Ed exclusive as usually and affects 3rd Ed devices as well. Sounds bad but to be really honest with...

It’s amazing to me that F-Secure and other ’security’ applications for S60 still exist. Who’s buying these apps, and why? Today’s episode is dubbed ‘the Curse of Silence‘, and reads just like any other scary story, told around a campfire with a flashlight facing the sky. According to this post at F-Secure’s site, at the 25th

F-Secure has today announced its Mobile Security 5 solution for devices running on Symbian S60 3rd edition platform. The security suite not only protects smartphones from viruses and spywares but also provides remote-wipe and remote-lock features that can be used to wipe off all sensitive data from the phone and lock the device in case it is lost. In case the SIM card is changed, the device w...

Companies in the News: Mformation, F-Secure, Qualcomm, Local.com, Virgin Mobile USA, ABI Research, RadioFrame Networks, ip.access, ZTE.

Steve Litchfield has taken the opportunity to lambast the BBC for a recent piece quoting people from Adaptive Mobile and F-Secure, two companies that conveniently offer commercial anti-virus software for S60-powered smartphones. The article goes on to warn readers of the threats of mobile viruses, particularly to the Symbian platform. As Steve correctly points out, there