New Mobile Virus Also Aims At PCs

The vendor said in its online blog that when the newly-discovered Cardtrap A is an "otherwise unremarkable Symbian trojan except it also tries to infect (the) user's PC." The company said that, when the trojan attempts to infect the smartphone, it also copies two Windows worms to the phone's memory card. The two PC viruses are Win32/Padobot.Z and Win32/Rays.

The former virus, Padobot.Z, is copied with the autorun.inf file and the virus creators apparently believe it will launch automatically if the user connects the storage card to the PC. However, F-Secure noted that Windows doesn't support autorun from memory cards.

In addition, the Rays virus is copied with the name SYSTEM.EXE, according to F-Secure. This is somewhat more dangerous because the virus creators give the virus the same icon as system folders so that users may inadvertently click on it.