Gavno.a And Gavno.b Attack Symbian

The first malware virus has been identified by SimWorks to be harmful to Symbian handsets, which is able to cause cell phones making phone calls. The virus Gavno.a is spread via an unofficial “patch.sis” file.

“The Gavno trojan disables a phone by using a a malformed file to crash an internal Symbian OS process. A similar technique was used by the SEXXXY trojan identified by SimWorks in December, however in the case of SEXXXY only a single button was disabled, not the entire phone. It is unclear whether there is any connection between the author of SEXXXY and the author of Gavno", says Davidson.

Users should download and install official updates and patches for their Symian phones. Gavno affects Series 60 phones using Symbian OS 7.x, such as the Nokia 6600 and 7610, but does as of yet not affect UIQ based Symbian OS devices such as the popular Sony Ericsson P900/910 and Motorola A925/1000, nor Series 60 based smartphones using Symbian OS 6.x such as the Nokia 3650 or Siemens SX1.