CellphoneVirus

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  • One million Chinese cellphone users reportedly infected with zombie virus

    by 
    Donald Melanson
    Donald Melanson
    11.11.2010

    Viruses have been making the rounds on cellphones for quite a while now, but it looks like China has now been hit by a particularly troublesome one. According to Shanghai Daily, a so-called zombie virus disguised as an anti-virus app has infected more than one million cellphone users in the country, and it's left users' phones vulnerable to the malicious hackers that created the virus. They've naturally taken advantage of that access to not only spread the virus further, but cash in by spamming the phones with money-making links and other general annoyances -- all of which has also added up to about $300,000 a day in added text message charges for the users affected. What's more, while authorities have apparently tracked down the company that created the anti-virus application, it apparently insists that it had nothing to do with the virus, and that it's actually a victim of it as well.

  • Phone-based virus transmission prank nets Pakistanis

    by 
    Brian White
    Brian White
    04.16.2007

    It appears that some wireless customers in Pakistan were recently worried that they may die due to a virus transmitted via their phones. What did they do in response? For starters, the authorities were inundated with concerned Pakistani phone owners and even some Karachi-area mosques made public announcements that there was indeed a killer mobile virus on the loose. We're not talking a software operating system virus here, but a virus that magically jumps from a person to person using a phone handset (through long-distance airwaves?). Pakistani authorities dismissed the large-scale prank by stating that "They (rumors) do not make any sense in technological terms." We agree.[Via textually.org, image via How Stuff Works]