Hot on the heels of a trojan for Windows Mobile devices, a trojan dialer for Symbian has been found disguised as a cracked game.
The first "trojan dialer" for Symbian Series 60 smartphones has been found in the wild, disguised as a cracked version of the game "Mosquito 2.0".
The game, apparently distributed via "Warez sites" and P2P networks, is a "cracked" version of the game Mosquito 2.0. Cracked software is a slang term for software designed to require registration information which has been edited, or "cracked", to not require a registration code or to always require some trivial code. However, this cracked copy also contains extra malicious code as well.
While the user is playing the cracked copy of the game, the trojan sends SMS messages in the background to a specific number in the UK, at the cost of as much as 1.50 GBP per message. The motive for this behavior is unclear. Such trojans could simply be designed to harass and cost people money to be malicious, or they could be designed to direct users to a for-pay number, in which case the owner of the number (who could be the author of the trojan or an accomplice) receives a hefty chunk of the per-message fee. The latter method is extremely common for desktop auto-dialer trojans.
The Mosquito trojan is not the first mobile trojan. Last week, a trojan called Brador was discovered in the wild for Windows Mobile handhelds. Several years ago the "Liberty Crack" trojan appeared briefly for the Palm OS, masquerading as a cracked copy of the Liberty Gameboy emulator for the Palm, although when run it simply deleted applications off of the handheld. The Mosquito trojan appears to be the first trojan dialer for mobile handhelds.
In order to protect themselves from auto-dialers and other malicious programs, there are a number of steps they can take. Among them, of course, is avoiding cracked "warez" software, as the legitimate version of Mosquito 2.0 does not contain such malicious code.
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