F-Secure has alerted users to the first appearance in the UK of the Commwarrior mobile phone virus.

According to the antivirus firm, the phone's owner picked up the virus via Bluetooth while on a sailing holiday in the Mediterranean. When she brought the phone back to the UK it started to send details to her contacts via MMS.

Commwarrior was first spotted in March and has since appeared in isolated outbreaks in countries around the world.

The virus tries to spread via Bluetooth between the hours of 8am and midnight, then stops these attempts and sends itself to everyone in the phone's contact lists via MMS until 7am. In the remaining hour it seeks to wipe evidence of its activities.

"It is quite a cunning virus. When you get a file by Bluetooth there is no information on what's in the file and users are likely to delete it," explained Patrick Runald, senior antivirus consultant at F-Secure.

"If it comes via MMS you will be getting a message from a friend's address book and are much more likely to accept the code. It is social engineering just as in the PC world."

But sloppy coding has severely limited the spread of the virus. The code only sends one or two MMS messages a night rather than emulating PC malware which typically attempts to distribute itself as quickly as possible.