Symbian malware, can it all be blamed on stupid users installing stuff?

During the past year, there has been quite a lot of publicity about viruses and worms that can infect Symbian-based phones. Also during that time there have been quite a few public opinions, which claim that the Symbian virus problem is greatly over hyped and users are to blame as the phone asks yes/no questions several times during installation of Cabir or other Symbian worm.

But is it really so easy? Us technologists like to blame users for being stupid or ignorant. But most often that is just an easy way out of uncomfortable problem.

Yes, it is true that the phone asks questions several times before Symbian malware is installed into a phone. But these questions could be written in a much more understandable way. Plus, just opening a bluetooth message in the phone inbox should not automatically start installation of whatever arrived in the message.

One has also to remember that people, who want their worms to spread and infect as many phones as possible, create Symbian worms. Thus the worm authors try to use the Symbian features in such a manner that forces users to answer “yes” for all questions.

For example, Cabir uses the tactic of constant bluetooth file transfer requests, thus bombarding the user with endless yes/no questions, and frustrating the user until he starts answering yes all the time.

This behavior can be demonstrated in this video.