A security firm claims as many as 100,000 smartphones have been compromised with malware which typically poses as a game and affects Symbian Series 60 3rd edition and 5th edition devices. The malware appears to be programmed to send SMS messages from compromised devices.

These botnets either send messages to all the contacts of the address book directly or send messages to the random phone numbers by connecting to a server.

The viruses even deletes sent messages from the users Outbox and SMS log. All messages contain URLs linked to malicious sites that users won’t be able to see until after they’ve fallen into the virus trap.

The Symbian Foundation said that the certificate used to sign has been revoked, so if revocation checking is enabled on a phone the malware will not run.

Ref: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/08/symbian_malware/