Sunday, 30 December 2012 12:46

New Trojan found for Android based phones

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The Russian team from Dr. Web today announced they have spotted a new Trojan for Android, which they named Android, well TheAndroid.DDoS.1.origin. It's not clear how the Trojan spreads - it is assumed that the authors use social engineering; affected users thought that they were installing legitimate software from Google on their smartphones. This is a very common tactic in the relatively open Google Play store and has been one of the problems that both Apple and Microsoft have used against Google in their battle for smartphone supremacy.

This Trojan will try to mislead customers on one more level - after installation the malware will replace legitimate commerce applications ( like Google's play), and if the user "clicks" on the icon, the malicious code will run the legitimate Google Play so the user may not even be aware that something strange is happening at the moment.

Once it's started, the Trojan will attempt to connect to a remote server, send the phone number of the user's smartphone and wait for orders. Some of the commands are the DoS attack on the certain server and sending of SMS. The Trojans presence will manifest in poor performance of smartphones and increased Internet traffic and a bigger bill in the case of SMS.

[Ed – the increase of malware is one of the major drawbacks to owning an Android smartphone. However, looking at the malware that is out there we have to wonder about the people that are getting these viruses and have the feeling that many of them would end up with malware on their PCs as well from the downloading and installation of unsafe programs. We saw the same pattern when people were trying to grab funny screen savers and animated backgrounds or all of the tool bars that people use for their web browsers. Google does need to fix this, but even if they shore up the Play Store  we have a feeling that some people will still find a way to get their phones and tablets infected…]

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Read 3163 times Last modified on Sunday, 30 December 2012 12:51

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