Topic: Mobile Trojans - a sign of things to come?

[mike2009]

A posting on the Internet Storm Center (ISC) portal from security organisation Sans yesterday pointed to another mobile Trojan doing the rounds. However, exactly what threat it poses is still unclear.

The Trojan in question created a thread which sent six SMS messages, the contents of which are obfuscated. However, what the Trojan is intending to do is still cloudy.

The ISC reader in question who alerted the site said he received the unsolicited message of garbled characters and a link to a .JAR (Java ARchive) containing the malware through ICQ.

Rather worryingly, according to ISC only 14 out of 41 AV products detected the JAR file successfully.

Rik Ferguson, senior security advisor at Trend Micro, one of the lucky 14 vendors which did detect the malware, said any mobile malware discovered is noteworthy, because there is so little of it around.

"It could be an attempt to find a way through Java to make it more cost effective to write malicious code because Java was designed to be cross-platform," he added. "It could be an attempt to overcome the homogeneity of the mobile platform."