Security issues in Windows Mobile 2003 and 5.0

As the use of handheld computers and smartphones moves toward ubiquity, it’s natural that vulnerabilities and exploits will become more commonplace. Here are the two latest warnings:

In the Pictures and Videos application that ships with all Windows Mobile 2003/2003 SE and 5.0 (Pocket PC and smartphone editions), if you open a malformed .JPG file, it can hang for 10-15 minutes, and this opens a vulnerability to a denial of service attack. There is also a fault in the default version of Internet Explorer on these Windows devices, too (why am I not surprised). The mobile device will shut down IE and become unstable if exploited, and the only thing users can do is reset their device to keep using IE.

The advice from Trend Micro (with respect to the second threat) is to avoid visiting untrusted sites on your Windows Mobile handheld.