“Crossover” Makes the Leap from PC to PDA

By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

The Mobile Antivirus Researchers Association has identified a virus that can infect both a Windows desktop computer as well as a PDA running Windows Mobile for Pocket PC. The malware was apparently sent to them anonymously as a proof-of-concept, and has not been seen in the wild.

When executed, the virus checks what type of machine it is running on. If it is a Windows PC, it will jump to a handheld device as soon as it detects a connection using Microsoft’s ActiveSync synchronization software. When running on a portable OS, it will erase all the files in the “My Documents” folder and copy itself to the startup folder.

The virus could also hurt the performance of the Windows PC because it re-creates itself each time the PC is started. This can mean a user will end up running so many copies that it bogs down the PC. Source: News.com

We Say: Last year F-Secure found a Trojan that tried the reverse, going from smartphone to PC. That was Cardtrap.A, and it attacked Symbian phones. This is reportedly the first one to go from PC to PDA.

There are more Symbian phones than Windows Mobile phones, so maybe Microsoft can look forward to “less attention” in this arena than in the desktop arena. At any rate, this could be the start of a trend, though at least they haven’t started to tailor viruses for mobile devices to look for username / passwords yet. This is just destructive.