What do you get if you infected 115,000 cell phones with a virus? In Spain, you get arrested. An unidentified man has been arrested following up a seven-month investigation. He's believed to be responsible for crafting about 20 iterations of the Cabir and Commwarrior worms, all of which run on Symbian OS and attempt to spread via bluetooth.
In a common case of pride before the fall, it seems the author wasn't exactly the most clever at trying to hide. He left a clue inside each copy of the worm, which may have had some impact on catching him:
According to Sophos, the man embedded his fiance's name - Leslie - in the worms' source code. Rival security company F-Secure had previously pegged Cabir's creator as a member of the '29a' hacker crew, and said his handle was 'ValleZ'. Commwarrior's author, however, was thought to be a Russian who went by the nickname 'Eldod0r'.
However, to his credit, it doesn't seem that malicious intent was on the agenda. According to Sophos, the worms are proof-of-concept, and not intended to disable or cripple a system. All they do is attempt to spread, not inflicting harm upon the phone or damaging the data inside. Whether or not that will have any impact on the outcome of this mans arrest remains to be seen.
Malware on cell phones is something that is thankfully very seldom seen. As cells continue to advance, however, it seems only natural that the number of threats posed to them will increase as well. Greater connectivity, more functions, ability to run more software... all potential security holes that unscrupulous folk will try to exploit.