New mobile malware wipes phones

An antivirus company has been sent software which crashes phones completely and requires a complete reformat to remove.

Fontal.A is a trojan that installs a corrupted font file onto phones while pretending to be legitimate software, causing the phone to fail when the mobile phone is next rebooted and locking it completely. It was sent to F-Secure a user who claimed he downloaded it off a Warez IRC site.

"The Fontal.A is a trojan, and as such it does not spread by itself, not over Bluetooth or any other channel," said said Jarno Niemela, a researcher at antivirus specialist F-Secure's laboratory.

"The most likely way to user to get infected would be to get the file from IRC or peer to peer fileshare and install it to the phone. So to avoid Fontal and other trojans, download files only from legal sources."

The trojan attacks Symbian Series 60 phones and once installed, damages the application manager so that it cannot be deleted. The only way to recover function is to wipe the phone completely, thus losing all the information stored on it.