InformationWeek > Trojan Destroys Mobile Phone Data > Trojan Destroys Mobile-Phone Data, Forces Owners To Reformat > April 6, 2005

InformationWeek > Trojan Destroys Mobile Phone Data > Trojan Destroys Mobile-Phone Data, Forces Owners To Reformat > April 6, 2005: "
A new Trojan horse hitting Symbian 60 Series handsets makes the phone useless until it's reformatted, deleting all the stored data, said a Finnish security firm Wednesday.
F-Secure said that the Fontal.a Trojan installs a corrupted font file into targeted handsets, causing them to fail at startup. Rebooting the phone by turning it off, then on, only compounds the problem, since the phone then essentially locks up.
'Currently the only known way to disinfect a phone that is infected with Fontal and is rebooted, is to reformat the phone, thus loosing all data on the phone,' said F-Secure in its online advisory. "