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Tuesday, August 10, 2010
First SMS Trojan for Android is in the wild
The first text message-based Trojan to infect smartphones running Google’s Android operating system has been detected in the wild. Trojan-SMS.AndroidOS.FakePlayer-A poses as a harmless media player application and has already infected a number of mobile devices, Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab warns. In a statement, Google said it existing permission controls guard against this type of type, which only exist for applications published outside the Android Marketplace. Users must explicitly approve this access in order to continue with the installation, and they may uninstall applications at any time.
There have been isolated cases of devices running Android getting infected with spyware since last year, but this is the first occasion that an SMS-spewing Trojan, common in the world of mobile malware, has affected devices running Google’s operating system.
If a user agrees to permit an application to access premium rate service during installation, the smartphone may then be able to make calls and send SMSs without further authorisation.