|
» Subscribe » Favorite Links » Freeware & Trials » S60 devices » Hints and tips » About this blog |
» analysis (1) » news (2) » reviews (2) |
|
» New kid on the block » Phone Guardian by Symbian Guru » The 1st S60 3rd edition virus... that wasn't » TARM - Terminal Administration Rights Model » Hello World! |
|
» September 2007 » December 2006 |
|
|
Subscribe RSS 2.0 feed |
Subscribe Atom feed If you wish to receive email notification, please here » |
« TARM - Terminal Administration Rights Model | Main | Phone Guardian by Symbian Guru »
So I got a phone call last week from someone who phoned to tell me about this new virus which they had discovered on the E61. The person went on to say it wasn't an isolated incident. I was told there were a couple of users in Europe who's devices kept making random phone calls, and in order for this event to occur it didn't ANY user intervention at all.
Furthermore, these calls were being made to completely random numbers and were occurring and completely different time. I was looking for patterns, so I requested more general information such as phone firmware, list of installed apps etc and the guy went off to collect this data.
After a few hours had passed I was contacted back. "It's OK Neil, we sorted it. It's not a virus at all"
So what happened?
It turned out the infamous Recording Button was the culprit. If you have early firmware (PR1 - meaning if it starts with 1.xxxx.xx.xx), then there is (dare I say) an 'undocumented feature' with regards to the functionality of Voice Tags. Let me briefly explain Voice Dialing: Holding down the Recoding Button invokes this feature. You say for example 'Fred' and it will look up and dial Fred from your phonebook - I am sure many of you are familiar with this feature.
It seems when Voice Dialing is run albeit deliberately (or in this case) accidentally, it will try to match the sound with a phonebook entry. If it doesn't find an exact match it dials what it thinks is the closest match. One can only assume it was not easy for the software to be able to differentiate between rustle (in your pocket) and Russell (your buddy). The problem here being that the program defaulted to dialing instead of resetting.
The good news is this has been fixed in the free PR2 firmware update so now it will default to not dialling at all if it doesn't find an exact match.
So the two solutions available for you are 1) upgrade your firmware to PR2 or 2) install a 3rd party automatic lock program such as the aptly named autolock from here which automatically lock the keypad after a pre-defined time.
Tip: If after reading this you decide to upgrade your E61 firmware, remember to take a phone backup first (Menu > Tools > Memory > Backup Phone Memory)