Kaspersky Labs Int., an international anti-virus software development company, reports the appearance of a new harmful program capable of wreaking havoc transmitting via mobile phones.

In the past few months, mobile phones and their users have had increasing attention paid to them by virus writers who have found a new playground in which to let their "children" play. (see details).

A certain "HSE" has created the program that permits the sending of SMS messages to handpicked numbers of this or that mobile phone at any moment and in any amount. He has christened his creation "SMS-Flooder," which seems intent on bringing the fear of "high waters" to the hearts of mobile phone users everywhere.

The program, written in MS Visual Basic 5.0, utilizes the public "canals" in mobile phone connections in order to transmit SMS messages: www.free-sms.com, sms-link.btn.de, www.nm-info.de, www.pcteam.de, www.mobidig.net, www.lycos.de.

Kaspersky Lab specialists classify this program as harmful, but state that the program itself is not dangerous, because it does not perform any destructive action and is not capable of "multiplying." The program's "conduct" thus far has been confined to Germany seemingly because the gateways only allow SMS messages on the German mobile phone network.

However, it is possible that this program is the first step towards the creation of a Trojan "horse," capable of attacking mobile phones; because it is possible a location in the program could do just that.

Details for the detection and neutralization of the harmful SMS-Flooder program have been added to the latest Kaspersky Anti-Virus daily anti-virus database update.