One of my predictions for 2005 was that

More and more mobile virus stories will hit the headlines. Only for the real story to emerge that to catch one you’d have to be as unlucky as to get struck by lightening on a clear day while standing in a rubber suit at the bottom of a swimming pool.

In the last few days, there’s been a flurry of these non-story stories. Cabir has been discovered on 2 mobile phones is the US - one in a mobile phone store. Pretty obviously, someone did this deliberately by polling available handsets in the store and pressing “yes” that they did want to install it. As any Bluejacker worth their name knows, mobile phone stores are good targets.

160 Characters has an excellent (if rather long) article by Nick Hunn of Bluetooth specialist Ezurio.

Here’s what you have to do to install one of these Bluetooth spread viruses:

1. Have a Symbian phone in the first place.
2. Activate Bluetooth, so your phone is discoverable.
3. When an unsolicited message appears, open it.
4. When your phone then asks you if you want to install a program that you havenít just deliberately downloaded, press YES - three times. (Asking you three times is built in to Bluetooth standards precisely to avoid non-morons accidentally installing stuff).
5. Apply for life membership of your local Stupid Society.

Still worried? It’s easy to make Bluetooth on your phone invisible by going to the Bluetooth menu and setting it to be ìnon-discoverableî or ìhiddenî. It’ll still work with your headset, PC, PDA and other Bluetooth devices ñ you just need to temporarily make Bluetooth visible when you set them up . But it means your phone ignores any legitimate Bluetooth messages which happen to be floating around. Or more prosaically you’ll avoid the fun and serendipitous experience of being Bluejacked.

The article also hints at a possible conspiracy theory - we love them, don’t we? It stands to reason that operators don’t like Bluetooth, as it doesn’t make them any money when you use it. Plus, it could actually cannibalize revenues by allowing savvy users to swap content (like ringtones) without paying either the data cost or the content cost.

That’s why, for instance, Verizon recently disabled Bluetooth recently as it allows them to keep control of your phone, in the classic walled garden strategy that never works.

So instead of disabling Bluetooth, they could spread viruses by Bluetooth and then get frightened users to ask their operators to disable Bluetooth. Brilliant!

Obviously complete rubbish*, but brilliant anyway.

Actually, a far bigger danger for the transmission of viruses is by MMS, but operators have been very canny about protecting us from this by making sure that MMS doesn’t work properly. Now that is clever
*Nick Dunn’s article doesn’t conclude this either, by the way.