Mobile phone malware is a special case of conventional malware that attacks mobile phones or smartphones. This can be a virus, a worm or a Trojan. However, this term does not include special SMS messages that exploit a bug on the target system, e.g. to cause it to crash.
The first worm for Symbian mobile phones, called Cabir (also known as Caribe), has been added to the list of virus definitions of various antivirus programs. It was developed by a member of the Virus Writers Group 29A and the source code was published. The worm spreads via Bluetooth and is forwarded from each infected device to other Bluetooth mobile phones that have Bluetooth enabled. It doesn’t matter what operating system the Bluetooth devices found in range have. The program is entered as “caribe.sis” in the inbox of the mobile phone and must be manually installed by the user on the mobile phone. However, its disguise as a regular application suggests a categorization as a Trojan.
Many other malicious programs from that time were mainly aimed at spreading themselves via SMS or Bluetooth, blocking the system or making it unable to start. Symbian, in particular, was a popular target, with several different types of malware available. In addition, almost every mobile phone ran a Java ME runtime environment, which made the viruses particularly portable.
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On modern smartphone operating systems, many of the old malware no longer run. Nevertheless, malware has also been written for such systems, especially Android, in recent years.
The focus of malware has shifted along with the platforms. Whereas in the past it was often a matter of making the system unable to start or run, modern viruses are more concerned with sending data on the mobile phone (e.g. pictures or contacts) to the programmers; This is made possible by the fact that many smartphones are connected to the Internet practically all the time and have Internet flat rates.
Malware on Smartphones
A security report in 2016 found the most mobile malware infections on Android devices (74%), followed by Windows/PCs (22%) and iPhone and other platforms (4%). The infection rate in the first half of 2016 was 0.49%, significantly higher than in 2015 (0.25%).
Both Apple’s iOS and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 / Mobile 10 can only install software via the App Store and Windows Phone Store respectively. Since the apps in these platforms are all checked before release, and all apps run in a sandbox, viruses in the traditional sense do not exist for these platforms.
However, there are Trojans for these platforms that disguise themselves as a game, for example, but send data to the programmer in the background.
Since Google does not always check the apps offered in the Google Play Store sufficiently and apps on Android can sometimes get a lot of rights (such as sending SMS), there are quite a few malware programs for this system. In September 2011, the number of malicious programs for Android was estimated at 200. In last 13 years, it has significantly grown. However, Google has the option of deleting such apps with malicious code from all Android devices.
Since almost no smartphone operating system can be completely changed by the user, not even Android, hackers have been exploiting security vulnerabilities in the respective systems to disable the security systems since the appearance of these systems. This process is also known as jailbreaking or rooting. After that, the user has complete access to the entire device.
The system is then susceptible to external attacks due to the deactivated security system. For example, relatively few iPhone jailbreakers change the root password after installing the SSH server; Since the root password is publicly known, an attacker can modify the device over the Internet. See the main article on jailbreaking for more examples.
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