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Sophos Debunks Mobile Phone Virus Hoax
From: InfoSec News <isn () C4I ORG>
Date: Fri, 23 Jun 2000 23:59:10 -0500
http://www.computeruser.com/news/00/06/24/news5.html By: Sylvia Dennis, Newsbytes June 24, 2000 Anti-virus specialist Sophos has reported a hoax virus message "doing the rounds." The message's text warns of a virus which displays the message "!?UNAVAILABLE!?" on your a phone screen and falsely references Sophos Anti-Virus and intY, an Internet service provider (ISP), in an attempt to make the hoax seem genuine. Sophos said that it defines hoaxes as false virus warnings describing extremely dangerous non-existent viruses. In this case, the firm said, the hoax warns that a virus will remove all information from the phone and render it useless. Hoaxes often cause as much of a problem as genuine viruses, Sophos added, because of the amount of e-mail bandwidth they take up when users are asked to forward them to everyone they know. Graham Cluley, Sophos' senior technology consultant, said there are no mobile phone viruses - mobile phones simply are not powerful enough in computing terms to be infected by viruses. "Hoaxes are a real problem to companies. Our technical support desk still receives more calls about hoaxes than about genuine viruses," he said. Sophos' Web site is at http://sophos.com ISN is hosted by SecurityFocus.com --- To unsubscribe email LISTSERV () SecurityFocus com with a message body of "SIGNOFF ISN".
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