wisebabo writes “A wallpaper utility (that presents purloined copyrighted material) ‘quietly collects personal information such as SIM card numbers, text messages, subscriber identification, and voicemail passwords. The data is then sent to www.imnet.us, a site that hails from Shenzen, China.’”

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alphadogg writes “Hoping to understand what a new generation of mobile malware could resemble, security researchers will demonstrate a malicious ‘rootkit’ program they’ve written for Google’s Android phone next month at the Defcon hacking conference in Las Vegas. Once it’s installed on the Android phone, the rootkit can be activated via a phone call or SMS message, giving attackers a stealthy and hard-to-detect tool for siphoning data from the phone or misdirecting the user. ‘You call the phone, the phone doesn’t ring, and when the phone realizes that it’s being called by an attacker’s phone number, it sends him back a shell [program],’ said Christian Papathanasiou, a security consultant with Chicago’s Trustwave, the company that did the research.”

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By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Security researchers at Kaspersky Lab announced the first malware for the Android operating system to be classified as a Trojan-SMS, the most widespread type of malware on mobile phones.

The malware is disguised as a media player application with the standard Android .APK file extension. When the 13KB file is installed, the mobile device will start to send SMS messages to premium numbers which incur charges on the user’s account.

Because Android is growing at such an explosive rate, and users are storing an increasing amount of important data on their mobile phones, the platform is an attractive one for renegade application makers.

“We can expect to see a corresponding rise in the amount of malware targeting [Android],” Denis Maslennikov, Mobile Research Group Manager at Kaspersky Lab said in a blog posting Monday. “Kaspersky Lab is actively developing technologies and solutions to protect this operating system and plans to release Kaspersky Mobile Security for Android in early 2011.”

The company has profiled the malware as “Trojan-SMS.AndroidOS.FakePlayer.a”

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

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siliconbits writes “A Trojan posing as a media player for Android smartphones automatically sends text messages to premium rate numbers, according to Kaspersky Lab. Company officials say the Trojan, dubbed Trojan-SMS.AndroidOS.FakePlayer.a, is the first of its kind for the Android platform, even though SMS Trojans are currently the most widespread type of malware on mobile phones.”

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