An Android trojan has been spotted making rounds in Russian networks which sends SMS to premium numbers (one’s that costs extra money) and has just been confirmed by Kaspersky as well.
SMS Android Trojan
This is the first text message based trojan to infect the Android smartphones. Trojan-SMS.AndroidOS.FakePlayer-A poses as a harmless media player application and has already infected a number of mobile devices, majorly in Russia and might spread to other places too if not addressed at the earliest. Kaspersky mentions that the trojaned media player file is just over 13 KB with the standard Android .APK extension.
Once installed, the Trojan begins sending SMS messages to premium-rate numbers without the owner’s knowledge or consent. Though there were some isolated reports of a Banking app trojan affecting few Android users early this year, this seems to be more wide-spread than the previous instances.
How to protect your Android phone from this Trojan?
Kaspersky Mobile Security for Android is only expected to be released in early 2011 as per the reports. The best you can do right now is to pay close attention to all the new apps you are going to install on your phone. It is really important that you understand the various Android permissions so that you smell foul when an application requests unwanted and extra access during installation.
[via]Kaspersky
Raju PP is the founder-editor of Technically Personal. He holds an Engineering degree in Electronics & Communication, and has previously worked as a Technical Specialist in Banking Software domain.
