NEW THREATS and a Valuable Freebie

Plishing – an email either faking an address or designed to appear as if it’s coming from a well-known and respectable source has been in the news lately. I’ve warned you about plishing months ago.

In the past six weeks or so, the threat has become so widespread that nightly TV news and the front pages of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and other prestigious media outlets have been sounding the alarm.

Malicious hackers induce email recipients to go to what they think is eBay, Visa, MasterCard, a mortgage company, or a large bank. Once at the site you are asked for your credit card details, your bank account, social security, driver’s license and other numbers. The inducement is to check your account, open a new bank account, get a mortgage, insurance, or a new credit card.

Those who provide the information are soon broke. Worse than broke, heavily in debt, financially ruined for life. Victims of identity theft often face years of legal battles, and perhaps even criminal indictments.

By now few surfers fall for the bait. However, without batting an eyelash, the thieves changed course. Now they pretend they’re on your side, fighting against an attempt to steal your identity.

Yesterday I received the following email:

eBay Fraud Mediation Request indeed. Needless to say, I didn’t click the link. But many people will. Fear of identity theft is rampant. Don’t go there.

Cell phone viruses make their debut

Once, logging into to our email accounts was something to look forward to; who knew what pleasant or interesting messages would come our way?

For a while, that changed.. Most of us dreaded digging through the spam which has taken control of e-mail systems worldwide, with junk email vastly outnumbering legitimate messages. And then, of course, there are the viruses hidden in so many emails.

Between the spam and the viruses, any fun there was in reading e-mail had been long gone.

Email, it turned out, was the most efficient way of spreading computer viruses. All a virus had to do was read an unwitting victim’s address book, replicate itself and attach itself to messages sent out from the victim’s email. Basing themselves on the "six degrees of separation" principle – that only six relationships separate any two individuals in the world – viruses were able to spread to all corners of the globe in days, until large swaths of the computer-using public were infected.

Fortunately, Microsoft plugged up many of the holes. Antivirus software improved greatly. Anti-spyware programs likewise improved. Fewer people responded to spam. At least in my inbox, spam declined.

Could cellphones be next? Earlier this year, virus researchers discovered the second bona fide cellphone virus, infecting multi-media (MMS) messages on Symbian OS phones (which include the vast majority of smart phones produced by Nokia and other companies).

This particular virus, called Commwarrior, affects Symbian Series 60 devices (used on smartphones manufactured mostly by Nokia), and spreads itself in a wormlike manner to users in the victim’s cellphone book! If your phone is Bluetooth enabled, it will attempt to send an SIS message to phones in the area (most new Bluetooth phones have a maximum communication range of 10 meters).

In addition, it will send MMS messages using random message names (so users cannot identify any file names to avoid). Generally, MMS messages are used by phone operating systems to send text or content messages, but apparently they can be used to send installation files as well. Once the worm infects a phone, it sends itself to other addressees, and eventually hatches itself – displaying a message in Russian – "No to braindeads," according to the security site F-Secure (www.f-secure.com/v-descs/ commwarrior.shtml).

Is it just a matter of time until cellphone viruses muck up mobile voice communications as they did email? Will we be subjected to ceaseless beeping from phony messages, causing users to chuck their cellphones and thus rendering them incommunicado while on the road (considering that public phones are nearly extinct, having been done in by those selfsame cellphones)?

It depends who you ask. While the potential for cellphone shenanigans is definitely not negligible, the nature of the cellphone market and the way such devices are used make it unlikely that cellphone users will experience the huge mess email users are faced with – but you never know.

One of the things that makes virus writers tick is the challenge – the ability to get into a system, bend, break and shape it to the virus writer’s will. So, with the ubiquity and popularity of cellphones, there’s no doubt virus writers will be very tempted to come up with a phone killer, just to be able to say they did.

COMMWARRIOR is not the first cellphone virus. That honor belongs to a program called Cabir, which was discovered in the middle of last year. Cabir, however, only spread itself via Bluetooth connections, so its range was limited. It also didn’t do anything except display its own name.

But the principle was established. If a cellphone virus can be used to spread itself, why couldn’t it, for example, be used to dial an expensive content phone number (like an astrology site that charges by the minute) and let it run for an hour or so – at 2 a.m.? The user will have no idea what happened until the bill arrives.

Cabir was just an experiment, and more malicious viruses using the same technology have already appeared. In January, virus sites said several people had been infected by the Skulls.D virus, a Cabir variant which tells people their cell phones have been infected by displaying a full-screen flashing skull, and prevents users from running applications, playing music or taking pictures with their cell phone cameras.

The users who reported the virus apparently got it after downloading an application from a Web site that had the virus bundled, Trojan style. This kind of attack can be prevented by installing and running a cellphone antivirus like F-Secure Mobile AntiVirus (www.f-secure.com/estore/ avmobile.shtml).

If you use lots of cellphone apps (like games) that you download from independent Web site forums (not from the Web sites of the major providers), you might consider getting a subscription to something like Mobile AntiVirus. In my opinion, the ‘independent’ web sites are pirate sites. The victims were most likely stealing games.

But before you run out to spend money on a cellphone antivirus program, consider whether you really need it. These viruses right now affect only smart phones with large amounts of memory and major 3G content connection capabilities – a far cry from the simple devices most of us use.

It just isn’t worth while for virus writers to invest their time and effort in writing viruses for puny phones – they wouldn’t really make much of an impact, and often require more memory than a cheap phone has available.

Most people use a cellphone for voice communications, though – and that aspect of the cellphone experience is in no way at risk for viruses (even Skulls.D did not affect voice communication). Basically, Cabir and Commwarrior are old fashioned email viruses which spread via MMS or Bluetooth instead of email attachments. So far, virus writers have not developed a way to automatically install their products – such as leaving "run attachments automatically" in Windows email programs.

So if you do get a message asking you to install an application you weren’t expecting, just say no. In addition, because content for cellphones is managed closely by the service providers, a virus that would call an expensive phone number at 2 a.m. would be unlikely to be too widespread – since the service provider would notice the pattern and take action.

So we cellphone users are probably safe – for now. On the other hand, those virus writers are a creative bunch, and chances are we’ll be hearing a more from them in the near future.

An extremely valuable freebie

As ToThePointers know by now, I am a software developer. Microsoft’s next development platform is known as Visual Studio.Net 2005. I’ve switched my new projects from VS.Net 2003 to 2005, although the later is still unfinished. It is much more powerful and easier to use.

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft sponsors forums open to Development Network Subscribers. One of the forums asks what improvements we’d like to see in the forums. A thread I started went thusly:

In case the writing is hard to read, among the suggestions I made was a spelling checker, so that when we posted to a forum we could correct our mistakes before making fools of ourselves.

The first reply seconded that suggestion. The second gave the link of a free spell checker that attached to Internet Explorer. The name of the freebie is iespell and the link is http://www.iespell.com/

Read about iespell, it’s features and how it works, then download it. Double click its icon in the destination program to install it.

As specified in the documentation, iespell will appear in the Tools menu:

Whenever you engage in a forum or other application in which you write in textboxes, use iespell to check your spelling. It has plenty of options:

Hopefully, I’ll return to Backup next week.

Dennis Turner