Virus Asks Permission Before Infecting PDA

[stormesixx]

Although not considered to be a critical threat, (it actually asks the user for permission to spread!) this proof-of-concept virus is certainly getting some attention from the anti-virus industry.

From F-Secure ...

Duts is a parasitic file infector virus. It is the first known virus for the PocketPC platform. Duts affects ARM-based devices only. Duts is a 1520 bytes long program, hand written in assembly for the ARM processor. When an infected file is executed the virus asks for permission to infect.

When granted the permission, Duts attempts to infect all EXE files in the current directory. Duts only infects files that are bigger than 4096 bytes and have not been infected yet. As an infection marker the virus writes the string 'atar' to the Windows Version field of the EXE header.

Read more on F-Secure's site

Duts info from Sophos

From Symantec's site

[schoon]

Ok, so if it's not a real threat, how easy would it be for someone to take the source code, remove the nice, "ask you window" and just let it proliferate uncontrolled? I for one, HATE the creators of virii and hackers in general. I think that they should use their knowlege and talent for good and not for this waste of time.