Unwired

App-phone Vulnerabilities Continue to Surface as Western Marketshare Grows

kris-szabo

North America is quickly catching up to Asia and Europe in terms of app-phone market share. As a result we are quickly encountering the same problems these countries have experiences with SMS Trojans for several years now.

As app-phones have been designed for easy of development, with security being almost an afterthought, malware writers have found this an obvious evolution of their activities. Currently, a new SMS Trojan has been noticed with limited infections targeting users several European and Western countries, including Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, and the UK. This Android Trojan has a couple of functions, each designed to deceive the user and run up charges on the bill. The infection accomplishes this by sending out and receiving SMS messages to premium SMS numbers and hiding the texts before the system can display or alert to user to their presence.

The unpolished security of virtually all app-phones on the market today, is a large factor in the spread of these types of malicious programs. However, an equally large part is due user negligence. A closed, locked-in market filled with an overwhelming number of similar applications leave little time to inexperienced users to sort out legitimate applications from the cruft. More over, many of the natural forces that allowed open app markets catering smart phones of generations past, no longer function to weed out substandard software.

SMS Trojans Spreading to the Rest of the World