MalWare and Windows Mobile?


StorageCards The threat of Virus/MalWare attack has been almost non existent for Windows mobile devices, but does the uptake of WinMo devices by enterprise users, makes it more of a target in this day and age?
You could cripple a company dependant on Windows CE devices for mobile communication, and stock control, with a well engineered worm, but how to deploy it to those devices. Well there are covert ways to do it.
All of us WinMo users are pretty smug about attacks like this that are, well, common with the desktop/laptop counterpart of the OS. The incidence seems low for WinMo and a quick search would still seem to indicate that.
It seems highly unlikely that you are going to be affected by problems over the air, but in a new twist, it may just be the accessories you use that introduce the problem.  Long known with hard drives for PC’s, the inclusion of a little nasty, has been well documented. You don’t have to go very far to find these occurrences.
Now the infection is coming to a storage card near you!

It seems a time worn strategy, someone works out a way to include an attacker on an accessory, like a storage card, and then boom it proliferates and you’re in trouble. Why?, most of the time I feel it’s because they can. It’s something to be aware of though, when you are buying your next, really cheap, really large, no name (read not mainstream, well known, reputable SD/CF, and the myriad of other formats, storage card manufacturer), storage card. You might get something as an extra that you don’t really want.

It’s not widespread yet, but it’s really something to consider!

SmartWorm for SmartPhone

Some Background

Via Computing Unplugged

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2 Comments

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tjchan
Nov 23, 2008

Doesn’t just have to be no name…granted this is a slightly different venue, earlier last week Lenovo had problems with one of it’s security packages which had malware in them. Also looking there I have heard at times factory image loads from other manufacturers like HP can come with trojans as well. Or being in tech support, I have personally seen a refurbished computer with 90 warranty have a 90 day operating system as the manufacturer loaded a TRIAL version of Windows XP. Not a good thing at all. Bottom line…when you buy a new card / device / whatever, use a good antivirus to scan it. If you can’t scan it, format it.


dgoldring
Nov 23, 2008

Well, Symantec just sent me a copy of Morton AV for Smartphone. We’ll see how that works.

Doug

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