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| Mobile Trojan horse tries to send premium rate SMS messages |
| Sunday, March 05, 2006 at 12:58 by Rich Kavanagh |
Experts at Sophos have urged mobile phone owners not to panic following the discovery of the first cellphone malware that tries to make money.
The Troj/Redbrow-A Trojan horse (also known as "RedBrowser") runs on certain phones with support for J2ME (Java Micro Edition), posing as an application which enables cellphones without WAP capability to have WAP access. The Trojan, which is entirely in Russian language, sends a number of premium rate SMS messages, costing the user money.
Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, said,
"Redbrow is a Trojan horse, which means it can't spread under its own steam. This, combined with the fact that it is written entirely in Russian and only works on the Russian mobile phone network, means that most people are extremely unlikely to ever encounter it. However, during the last year we have seen more and more malware being written for profit, and this is further evidence of that growing trend."
This is not the first time that Russian hackers have tried to use malware to exploit the cellphone SMS system. In late 2004, the Troj/Delf-HA Trojan horse was discovered, which helped spammers send unsolicited spam messages to mobile phones.
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| So why not make restrictions on the java applets? for example preventing them from accesseing all the phones transmission functions(SMS,Calls,BlueToothe,IR etc...). |
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| good. maybe this will make the russians take this stuff seriously and put a stop to the tidal wave of spam coming from that area of the world
Of course the collapse of russian economy won't help matters. Still at least they are stealing from their own this time and not polluting the rest of the world for a change |
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| Its terrible the number of Spam Reverse Billing SMS messages that are around these days! Fortuantly my businesses telecoms provider told me that the premium rate regulator ICSTIS can shut the service down and FINE the operators! |
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| Phones running J2ME generally ask the user for permission before connecting to a service on the phone that could cost the user credit. For example, we have a J2ME app that sends SMS via GPRS rather than over the SMS network. This means that a 160 byte message costs 2p to send rather than 10p on a standard tariff. Blocking useful programs like this to stop the odd virus is not the way to move forward.
Dan, FreebieSMS.co.uk |
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