Viruses in your cellphone, are they real?

Zatni Arbi, The Jakarta Post, Contributor

The question that has been nagging a lot of cellphone users like us is whether the so-called cellphone viruses are real?

The computer virus is a human-engineered program that attaches itself to the host system and creates havoc, from flashing funny messages on the screen to wiping out all stored data.

Now, with GSM cellphones networks having the capability of sending and receiving text messages, or short message service (SMS), would it not be possible for a bedlamite with programming skills to write a virus program and send it to our cellphones and give us a bad day?

Some of us may still remember the e-mail alert warning against an outbreak of mobile phone virus in August this year.

It was said that the virus would steal the identification and PIN numbers of SIM cards allowing the perpetrators to use our accounts to pay for their calls. Somehow, nothing serious followed this warning.

Rara Willis, the communications manager of Trikomsel, a leading local cellphone retailer, kindly helped us find the answer.

She went the extra mile by asking cellphone vendors to dig out the real truth. The answers she received were unanimous: Up till now there is no such a thing as a cellphone virus.

While we have heard of and even suffered from computer virus attacks, so far there has no real case of a cellphone virus, or of a worm or Trojan horse incident.

But, some of us may recall that last year subscribers of Telefonica, a major telecommunications operator in Spain, were reportedly infected by the world's first cellphone virus.

It turned out that the report was misleading. The virus actually attacked a number of computers and generated e-mail to be sent to the randomly-selected cellphones using the SMS.

So, the worm, named Timofonica, did not infect the cellphones, it only bombed them with an annoying unsolicited message.

Arman Hazairin, general manager for IT development from Telkomsel, a major GSM cellphone operator in Indonesia, has a quite enlightening explanation for us.

"Every GSM cellphone has two main components, the cellphone itself and the SIM card - a card with a microchip - that we insert in it. The firmware in the cellphone can be programmed, and so can the SIM card that contains information such as the call number and the address book.

"Theoretically, it is possible for people to create viruses that can reprogram the firmware or wreak havoc on the IMIE and IMSI data stored in the SIM card."

The good news, according to Arman, is that cellphone operators have always prevented this from happening, and the SIM card is also protected against any attempt to rewrite it before it is sold to subscribers.

However, Arman, being a realist, added that there was no absolute guarantee that a cellphone virus would not appear in the future.

"The fact of life in the digital era is that there are so many more people working on ways to create viruses for any system than those who are trying to protect it," he said.

Besides, as cellphones now come with more and more features, some of which can be updated by downloading programs from the Internet, the threat of cellphone viruses could become real.

However, for now, the industry is in complete agreement that the cellphone virus is still a hoax rather than a real problem.