Security firm F-Secure is reporting on its blog about the discovery of a combination of two malware (a malign software) that can cause big problems for users if not removed in one hour. A new Symbian trojan Doomboot.A drops a copy of self-replicating Commwarrior.B while installing itself on Symbian Series 60 smartphones.
The report says that while other trojans have dropped several different Cabir variants, Doomboot.A is the first known trojan that drops Commwarrior. And also the technique used to break the phone is new.
The combination of Doomboot and Commwarriors can have several effects on the phone. The Doomboot.A causes the phone not to boot anymore and Commwarrior causes so much Bluetooth traffic that the phone will run out of battery in less than one hour. Thus the user who gets his phone infected with Doomboot.A has less than one hour to figure out what is happening and disinfect his phone, or he will lose all data and be unable to start the phone after this.
Since the Doomboot.A installation is purported to be a craked version of a game, users are unaware of this problem since it just looks like a failed installation. There is no visible icon or any program in the list of active processes.
If the users phone runs out of battery or user switches off the phone, the phone can be recovered with a special hard format key combination. The actual phone hardware is not damaged by the trojan.
Like most of the Symbian trojans Doomboot.A also pretends to be a pirate copied Symbian game. So people who don't download and install pirate copied games or applications are safe from nasty surprises
