Worm ready to wriggle into smart phones

Antivirus companies on Monday raced to decipher the workings of the first worm to target smart phones, while saying that the current incarnation of the program poses little threat.

The worm program, dubbed Cabir by Russian antivirus company Kaspersky, apparently uses the Bluetooth short-range wireless feature of smart phones that run the Symbian operating system to detect other Symbian phones, and then transfers itself to the new host as a package file. While able to replicate the spread of the virus in research settings, antivirus companies have not found any evidence that the program is infecting smart phones outside of those limited test cases.

After infecting a phone, the program creates an application package file containing the worm and passes it to another phone over an automatically established Bluetooth connection, according to antivirus companies. The phone that received the program installs the application, thus infecting itself.