Kaspersky Lab has announced the discovery of the first Trojan for Android based phones in the wild. Trojan-SMS.AndroidOS.FakePlayer-A masquerades as a media player application for the smartphone, prompting the user to install what appears to be an ordinary Android app. Once installed, the trojan begins sending SMS messages to premium-rate numbers without the phone owner’s knowledge. So far the trojan has only been found in Russia, but there’s technically nothing to prevent it from spreading further. The person or persons responsible for this new Trojan are believed to receive a cut of the profits from the premium rate numbers.
As smartphones have proliferated, so have Trojans. And as power increases with each new smartphone, it becomes more and more of a viable platform for these sort of attacks. This latest news follows an investigation by the BBC, who created a mobile application to demonstrate just how easy it is to do with modern smartphones. They were able to use standard, easily obtained developer kits for application development to create the application which could log usernames, passwords, and credit card details and send it to the malware author undetected.
This brings the total number of known SMS Trojans to 771 according to Securelist, which hasn’t added this latest one to its list yet. Apple is actively working to close at least one known vulnerability on the iPhone, and this may force Google to pay more attention to security on the Android OS and what applications it allows into its Marketplace. Kaspersky Labs said that this is the first wild malware for Android, but they expect to see more as Android’s market share grows.
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