Virus worms are everywhere and as I mentioned from an earlier episode, it all stemmed from a mistake. But this mistake has manifested in a variety of different worms that have dealt massive damage.

One such worm virus I want to highlight is Timofonica, a worm that raided European cell phones in 2000. This was a new kind of worm that signalled a new medium for hackers. After all, they could now get into wireless phones and begin to do all kinds of damage.

At the time, Timofonica was a simple VBS chain letter. Think of those obnoxious chain letters you would get. That or maybe you were a victim of the LoveLetter worm (also known as ILOVEYOU) when that was still prominent.

But what makes this particular worm different about the other worms up to this point is that the worm forces the phone to send out short messages to other phones via a gateway. All in all, the idea was for the worm to obviously overwhelm a system with all of these text messages and try to break down a particular system.

The sort of good news about this particular worm though is you will likely never receive it. The only reports of this worm virus existing came from residents in Spain and the worm only targeted particular phones at the time - specifically the Nokia brick phones at the time.

So if you are travelling to Spain, you won’t have to worry about this particular virus. However as I said before, this particular worm sparked a series of mobile virus worms now that people cracked the code so to speak.