Ho John Lee’s Weblog

This turned up on my cell phone a few minutes ago.

I have no idea whether this is really from Cingular or not, but I’m sure some trusting people will go ahead and click the link.

It’s unauthenticated, sent to my phone via WAP push, with no way to verify that the originator is Cingular, McAfee, or an affiliate. They want me to download a binary and run it on my phone. Just lovely.

I hate the fact that its just as likely to be from an attempted security exploit as it is from Cingular. There’s no obvious mention of this on the Cingular public site, customer service site, or a quick Google search on Cingular and McAfee. Unfortunately, Cingular, like the other wireless service providers, tends to be poor at communicating with subscribers, other than attempting to upsell and cross sell services, so your guess is as good as mine whether this is authentic.

To help protect your phone from the following viruses, Cingular & McAfee have partnered to provide McAfee Stinger Mobile phone-based software to detect and remove the following viruses from your Nokia Series 60 phone:

• CommWarrior.A
• CommWarrior.B
• Drever.A
• Locknut.B
• Fontal.A

To download and use this software:

1. You must first agree to this End User License Agreement

2. Click here to download

…

I’ll take a pass for now.

Update 08-30-2005 17:06 - follow up post, apparently it really is from Cingular

This entry was posted on Friday, August 26th, 2005 at 10:23 am and is filed under Wireless, Security, Photos, Front Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.