It turns out that the trojan dialer game for Series 60 phones found this week wasn't part of the crack; it's deliberate copy protection gone bad.
New information has surfaced regarding this week's news of a trojan dialer for Symbian Series 60 smartphones disguised as a game. It turns out that the dialer was put there deliberately by the game author.
According to security firm F-Secure, the "Mosquito Trojan" (or Trojan.Mquito) automatically sends an SMS message to a specified number not as part of a crack, but as a deliberate security mechanism put there by the developer of the Mosquito game, Ojum. The intent was that if the program detected that it was cracked or being run on an unauthorized device, it would dial a specified number owned by Ojum to report itself.
The copy-prevention system malfunctioned, however, resulting in a number of complaints to the company. Ojum later removed the "phone home" functionality from the program, but by that point illegal "cracked" copies had appeared on some warez web sites and P2P networks. The cracked copies were cracks of the version that did include the spy-dialer, so when run began sending text messages to the premium number, resulting in hefty fees.
Ojum has since cancelled premium service on the number, so future text messages to that number will only be billed as a normal text message. Ojum claims that the new version of the game does not include the dialer trojan functionality, so users sticking to the most up to date legal copy are safe from silent dialing. However, it will not function outside of the UK.
F-Secure is still classifying the original as a trojan program. Cracked copies may still contain the Ojum trojan dialer functionality. Users infected with older copies of the program or with the cracked version can simply delete the program normally, as it does not appear to install any deeper OS hooks.
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