abhay 0 Report post Posted February 10, 2006 Nokia phones come under virus attack in KolkataYou have a cellphone, right? Store all your telephone numbers at least in the SIM card. Especially after what a considerable number of cellphone users faced in Kolkata on Wednesday and Thursday, don’t take this lightly. Be sure where your phone stores the numbers. If it’s the phone memory, either transfer to the SIM card, or have a back-up ready. It was the weirdest experience for many Hutch subscribers with Nokia handsets on Wednesday afternoon, seconds after 1600 hours. The sets just died on them. Period. Most thought it was a set-specific problem.... you know, like the user’s particular handset developing sudden problems. Thursday, they all rushed to Hutch and Nokia shops, only to find that the problem was both singular and collective. Singular because only four sets out of the Nokia stable, the 6610, its variant the 6610i which has a camera, the 3530 and the 2300 — have supposedly been attacked by a virus. Dumbfounded users, who had never heard of a virus attack on mobile phones, were amazed to see that it was a collective problem indeed, since many more like them had crowded the Nokia and Hutch outlets to see if something could be done. What these hapless subscribers found out was stranger. The sets per se would get repaired, they were told. Free of charge. But all data stored in the phone memory would be lost forever. Only data stored in the SIM card was retrievable. Imagine the scene. An angry buzz, growing louder by the minute of shell-shocked cell users, who didn’t know exactly what to do even as counter personnel in these shops tried their best to pacify them. Apparently, this is the second time in a year such a virus attack has taken place, specific to the Nokia 6610 and 3530 models! When contacted, Hutchison Telecom East’s VP (marketing) S Murli told ET, “We are completely unaware of any Hutch customer complaints about select Nokia handsets going dead on Wednesday afternoon. Our internal records across all Hutch customer touchpoints in the city indicate that only one customer complained about a possible software crash on his cellphone. It’s a complete false alarm.” Senior Nokia officials were equally defensive about the handsets fiasco in Kolkata and vehemently dismissed the virus theory. “We have no information about either the Nokia 6610 or the Nokia 3530 crashing en masse in Kolkata owing to a possible virus attack. Both are ramped down models which we believe are no longer in mass circulation in India. But there could be some defective phones that may have been procured illegally from the grey market over which we have no control,” said Sunil Dutt, who heads sales and marketing at Nokia India. Nokia India’s official spokesperson wasn’t available for comment. And yet, the freak incident wasn’t just confined to one or two users. The Nokia Care shop on Shakespeare Sarani had dozens of confused cell users trying to make out what happened when ET photographers went there to survey the scene. S Sengupta, Manjula Todi, KR Dutta, N Biswas, RS Shaw, Tapan Ghosh, Shekhar Majumdar, Arindam Sengupta, Prakash Kamath...the list can go on...weren’t making false claims. Nor were they stray buyers of defective Nokia handsets from the gray market. About 40-odd affected subscribers who were there at the shop around the time when ET visited it, gave their respective phone numbers to ET too. Was it a virus? Strangely, Hutch and Nokia officials had clammed up from Wednesday night itself when ET started making its first enquiries. In the absence of any official confirmation from both companies, a multitude of theories were doing the rounds on Thursday in city customer and trade circles, ranging from a sudden virus attack on select Nokia GSM phones to a possible mobile software crash or even a technical glitch on the Hutch network, especially since virtually all reported cases at local Nokia Care centres appeared to come from Hutch subscribers. Funnily, there were no reported instances of mass handset failures in the city from Airtel customers using Nokia 6610s or Nokia 3530s. Call it providence or sheer luck, but users of this handset who might have kept their phones switched off on Wednesday afternoon when the virus attacked, may just have escaped the holocaust. Interestingly, investigations by ET tend to confirm that both Hutch and Nokia were only too aware of the handset jinx in Kolkata. In an apparent bid to pre-empt a full-blown crisis, Hutch officials, it is learnt, had silently urged all four designated-Nokia Care centres in the city to remain open on Thursday (despite it being a national holiday on account of Moharram) to redress Hutch customer grievances free of charge, especially since Hutch offices and tele-shops were closed. Hutch officials vehemently denied this saying they had left no instructions with Nokia. But officials at the Nokia Care centres had something very different to say. “We were asked by Hutch to keep the Nokia Care Centres open on Thursday despite it being a holiday, specially to address handset-related complaints from Hutch customers free of charge. We’ve already received over 100 complaints about their mobile phones suddenly going dead since Wednesday afternoon and expect many more. It’s true that maximum complaints have been lodged by Hutch owners of the Nokia 6610,” said officials at a swanky Nokia Care Centre which was packed on Thursday with over 40 irate Hutch customers with dead Nokia 6610s. It is, however, not known whether Hutch or Nokia will pay for software replacement on the lifeless handsets. Yes, worst affected in the crisis was the Nokia 6610. Although the model is no longer in official circulation like the Nokia 3530, sources at Nokia Care hinted that nearly 40per cent of the city’s over 7 lakh Hutch mobile users had at some point had a Nokia 6610, which was undoubtedly one of the hottest cellphone models before camera phones arrived. http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articl...997,curpg-1.cms hey can any1 conform this one!! has some1's phone been under attack here ?? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Rohit Rocker 0 Report post Posted February 10, 2006 How did it spread actually? Its not mentioned in the article. MMS? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
abhay 0 Report post Posted February 10, 2006 nopes cant be coz they have mentioned NOKIA 2300!! 2300 dose not have color display/mms/memory card etc etc its just a simple 3310 with a radio yeah i also want to know how did the virus spread Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
alfansey06 0 Report post Posted February 10, 2006 i agree with abhay: Nokia 2300 is a very basic phone. you cannot install application in it, it doesn't have any connectivity option (no Bluetooth, IR, MMS, GPRS, Data cable) then how the virus enters the phone. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
theking 35 Report post Posted February 10, 2006 Hee hee hee...Nokia installed a date virus...!! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Vishal Gupta 4 Report post Posted February 10, 2006 I'm sure it would come thru SMS! I hv heard some years b4 about a virus for Nokia 3310, which came thru SMS and caused of mobile crashing... Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
alfansey06 0 Report post Posted February 10, 2006 OK, Here it is: Feb 13 2002 Security researchers in Holland have found a way to crash some Nokia mobile phones using a malformed text message. The pernicious message exploits a bug in the Nokia phone software and, if received, will render some handsets completely unuseable. The troublesome SMS message was discovered by Job de Haas, a researcher at Dutch security firm ITSX. It affects Nokia 3310, 3330 and 6210 handsets. Despite the discovery, anti-virus and security experts said that people should not be worried that a new era of SMS vandalism or hand-held viruses was about to strike. They said that virus writers found it far easier to exploit the weaknesses of PCs and their users to spread computer viruses. Mr de Haas created the malicious message by tinkering with the parts of SMS that users do not see but tell a phone what to do with incoming text messages. Nokia claims it closed the loophole in its software late last year to ensure new phones could not be crashed by such messages. However, many older handsets could be still vulnerable. Security experts said Mr de Haas's discovery would not kick off the long-anticipated spread of viruses to phone handsets and handheld computers. The work involved in mastering the novel programs and technologies in phones and handheld computers is a good deterrent to most virus writers who tend to feed off the work that others have done, said Graham Cluley, spokesman for anti-virus company Sophos. "If you look at the motivation of the average virus writer, they just want to spread their graffiti as much as possible," he said. "They would rather spread a visual basic virus through the net because that's so trivial to do." Visual Basic is a simple programming product from Microsoft that has become the tool of choice of many virus writers. Some of the biggest viruses of the last couple of years, such as Melissa, I Love You, Kournikova and Goner, have been Visual Basic programs. Mr Cluley said that Mr de Haas had exploited a bug in software to create the pernicious message rather than write a self-perpetuating virus that could hop from phone to phone unaided. Before now only one virus had been found targeting handheld computers. The phage virus was created to attack Palm computers, but it only ever existed in a lab and had never been found in the wild, he said. Many phones could be remotely updated via SMS to sign them up to new services, a route that could be exploited on future phones by computer vandals Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Rohit Rocker 0 Report post Posted February 10, 2006 I'm sure it would come thru SMS!I hv heard some years b4 about a virus for Nokia 3310, which came thru SMS and caused of mobile crashing... Ya, even i had read this some time back. Some Nokia phones have a built in defect which allows it to be crashed by just sending a malacious sms. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
@ksh@T 20 Report post Posted February 10, 2006 well as far as i know this malicious code is 6 dots in six messages ...... send this as message six times it destroys..i have heard but not sure...try at your own risk! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
theking 35 Report post Posted February 10, 2006 Akshat, give me ur no. pls ...... ...... ...... ...... ...... the last one i will save for u dude Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Rohit Rocker 0 Report post Posted February 11, 2006 That was funny. But it was not related to dots. It was something like an incomplete Header of the sms i suppose. But i am not sure. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
ashoksoft 83 Report post Posted February 13, 2006 rather than dots ... what it actually is five or more characters above ASCII 255 (unicode)... in fact take a mobile with its bluetooth mobile name as some such character.. when someone tries to search for mobiles, and sees ur mobile ... the searching mobile restarts!! Cheers Ashok Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Rohit Rocker 0 Report post Posted February 13, 2006 Hi Ashok, Welcome back! I had heard about the bluetooth trick. Is'nt it that instead of someone searching for our mobile, we ourselves can also shut their mobile without them searching for our device. There is one counter measure also for what you have stated above Any update on the VIRUS??? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
abhay 0 Report post Posted February 13, 2006 rather than dots ... what it actually is five or more characters above ASCII 255 (unicode)... in fact take a mobile with its bluetooth mobile name as some such character.. when someone tries to search for mobiles, and sees ur mobile ... the searching mobile restarts!! Cheers Ashok b clear plz!!! this is intesting Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
