Kaspersky Lab antivirus researchers have discovered three Trojan horse variants that are the most successful attempts yet to steal money from smartphone users. The variants on the Viver Trojan (short for Trojan-SMS.SymbOS.Viver) send text messages to premium-rate numbers in Russia, a tactic used by some previous malware. Viver was uploaded to a popular file-sharing site for mobile users, presenting itself as a photo editor, set of video codecs or other utility. It was downloaded by hundreds of users before it was removed, according to Kaspersky senior virus analyst Aleks Gostev.
The variants are written for the Symbian platform (making it the first Trojan of this type for smartphones) - specifically Nokia's S60 version of the operating system, second edition and earlier versions, according to antivirus firm F-Secure. The new Trojans still text to a Russian number but use correct international dialling codes, and thus are not limited to working in Russia. They don't require any user interaction, but simply begin sending texts as soon as they're installed. Each text costs the user 177 roubles, or about $7.
News source: ComputerWorld
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