Proof of Concept PocketPC Virus Created 152
SpooForBrains writes "The Register has reported that "Ratter" of the virus writing group 29A has created the world's first PocketPC virus as a proof of concept. This one has no payload and is polite enough to ask if it can spread, so the dangers are minimal, but it occurs that the possibility of PocketPC and Symbian virii suddenly makes the concept of bluejacking somewhat more sinister."
E-Darwin (Score:5, Insightful)
It is inevitable that any networked system will suffer from these attacks. See the recent Mozilla shell exploits. We have Linux security issues, and as the OS gains popularity, we will start to see virii for it. It will happen.
We have basically created electronic primordial soup. Three cheers for compu-evolution!
No danger yet. (Score:5, Insightful)
How many times? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is news? (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean, c'mon people, the pocket pc is running windows. This virus isn't exactly revolutionary.
At least now I can justify the Zaurus [pdabuyersguide.com] over the 'other guys'!
Yet another reason to run Linux on your PDA (Score:4, Insightful)
Famous last words (Score:5, Insightful)
Duts may not be able to spread, but take out the bits that make it "benign" and you've got the makings of a real annoyance. Even if the source for this particular virus is kept safely out of the hands of malicious individuals, the fact that its now been proven do-able means others will try.
Re:E-Darwin (Score:5, Insightful)
a) There are sadistic people who like to cause people harm by investing time and money into writing virii that inconvenience, destroy data, and render devices useless - meaning to do ALL of these things ON PURPOSE.
b) Viruses evolve.
The fact is, there's no little Virus overlord someplace up in the sky that's trying to cause damage and harm to humans. There *are* lots of other humans who love causing that same damage by writing malicious code.
If everyone decided tomorrow to stop trying to break the machines that others have worked so hard to build, voila - they'd not be broken anymore.
Sadism / Sociopathy has little to do with the Biological Evolution of Viruses. What gives? Why are people so quick to assume that it's okay for people to break things and hurt people just because it's possible to do so?
Trustworthy computing...a myth? (Score:3, Insightful)
Bluetooth viruses... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a neat proof-of-concept, but I think these virus creators should go back to hacking cell phones if they want to make waves.
Speading viruses via Sybian? (Score:1, Insightful)
What this really proves... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:E-Darwin (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:bluejacking (Score:2, Insightful)
as far as i know, it is possible to display a message on someone's phone without them giving consent. the trick is to create a bogus name in your phone book, and then send that. alot of phones will display a message like
however, to spook someone out (which is really the ultimate goal of bluejacking) you create a 'name' like
or when the beeps and bemused looks let you work out which poor sucker you have snagged something like
i guess it would be possible to get something nasty into someone's phone, but even with the vcards, it's only the name that gets displayed. although i admit it's mean to tease people with impunity from the other side of the tube train; it could be very useful on a long journey with one of those people that we all love - you know the ones who have a long conversation with a friend for a few hours. of course, when i say conversation, i mean monologue...
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How many times? (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't really care about english, but in the common jargon the plural is 'virii' and in my mother language (italian) is just 'virus'.
A more complete article could be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural_of_virus/ [wikipedia.org]
For the people who will reply that english is the language in use on slashdot I would like to point that probably it's the english+jargon the language actually in use
Re:obligatory (Score:3, Insightful)
But unlike the Pocket PC OS, Palm OS is mutli-threaded, single-task OS. You would have to trick the OS into making the virus a new Thread of the current process... Not impossible but a bit harder to do...
I see to remember a article that compared the Pocket PC OS with PalmOS, stating that, while PalmOS was inferior, It was better designed for the job (it did not try to do everything)... I don't have the link (I'm at work)
Any Palm dev/coder out there that could comment?
Re:How many times? (Score:3, Insightful)
You call yourselves geeks, you chew people out for the smallest technical error in a linux thread, you go apeshit if someone refers to "Hans Solo" or says Python has cleaner syntax than perl, but you don't take the time to learn the rudiments of the English language.
English is a geek's dream. So much more rich and complicated than anything computing has to offer. Full of curiosities, paradoxes and rules, and incredibly elegant and powerful. Dig in. Enjoy. You can read some pretty amazing books while you're at it.
You confuse "you're" and "your", "they're" and "their", "loose" and "lose", and when someone takes a moment of their time to try and teach you a little something, you call them a "Nazi".
When your C compiler chokes on "maloc" do you whine that "it's obvious what I meant and anyway, languages evolve"?
If you present the linguistic skills and maturity of a nine year old, you might find it's hard to get people to listen to your opinions, however valid they might be.
I'm not nitpicking for the sake of it, I really want people to go out and enjoy learning a valuable skill. Language is wonderful. Make the most of it.
Re:E-Darwin (Score:3, Insightful)
I disagree with you wholeheartedly. While I have better things to do than write viruses, I think the people that do it contribute to software in an unignorable, public way. They exercise complex systems in ways that companies themselves would otherwise refuse. As we become more and more advanced as a society, our software systems take control over more and more elements of our daily lives.
The catchword for this discussion is: robustness. We absolutely need our systems to be robust if we're going to depend on them. Let's say for a time we were somehow able to figure out a way to get people to stop writing viruses and probing security in general. Companies would undoubtedly get lazy, and the whole thing would get saved up for one big cataclysmic event per major software system once some foreign company/government/organized crime/terrorist group had something big to gain.
Think about banking software...a foreign group figures out how to exploit bank software, and because we're so naive we've never written any code that prevents it into our banking software. Think about the economy...a terrorist organization could strike us from wherever they are simply by probing for years and years, and then unleashing hell on earth with major coordinated attacks. Think about governments--these are less for the big-style public attacks, but they could tease out information about their own citizens or those of other countries and have information they shouldn't.
The fact is, we shouldn't be scared of the guy hacking in his basement...we should welcome his attacks and take responsibility for thwarting them, because if a guy with an 486 running Linux in his basement can hack a corporate server that contains sensitive data, or infect everyone's desktop machines at home with some viral code, what could a big company or country do with millions of dollars in resources? Your approach needlessly puts us at the whim of those who are able and have better reasons for hacking into our personal affairs.
Also, consider the fact that advances in one area (security) often contribute to advances in other areas--someday we may advanced methods of brute force security when we move to an AI model...not to protect systems from people necessarily, but from the probes and attacks of an evolving and not always controllable computer system. This is a contrived point, but we need to make sure we've evolved in all areas to the point of being able to control our future when any one area gets advanced enough.
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