New Android Trojan Reported

A month after the first trojan affecting Android phones was reported, a new variant of the trojan has been reported by Russian anti-virus firm Kaspersky Labs. The trojan also known as Trojan-SMS-AndroidOS-FakePlayer-B is being transferred through Russian websites offering pornographic content. Whenever a user visits these websites, the trojan installs itself by posing as media player application. During installation, the applications asks for the user's permission to acess Android's messaging system. If the user gives the permission, the applications begins sending SMS messages to a premium rate number(sending an SMS to a pay service, such as donation codes for the Red Cross, or ringtone services advertised on Television ) which costs around $6. However, if the user denies permission the malicious code won't be able to run.

“Android users should pay close attention to the services that an application seeks permission to access,” said Denis Maslennikov, mobile research group manager at Kaspersky Lab.

“Automatically permitting a new application to access every service that it says it needs to means you could end up with malicious or unwanted applications doing all sorts of things without requesting any additional information.”