A reported 52 new Trojan horse programs are taking aim at cell phones using the Symbian smart-phone technology and crashing numerous critical phone components in spite of their benign appearances, cell-phone antivirus maker SimWorks said April 20.
SimWorks Chief Executive Aaron Davidson said that it’s not yet know whether any phones have been affected by these new Trojans, but SimWorks and other security companies like F-Secure are trying to wake up the cell-phone industry to the potential trouble. These new Trojans are said to raise the number of known Symbian Trojans to more than 100 and counting, F-Secure said.
SimWorks describes the Trojans as “cracked versions” of Symbian applications like BitStorm, BugMe!, Cosmic Fighter, 3D Motoracer, SplashID, and other game and similar applications. The Trojan files are also believed to include versions of prior bugs like Cabir and Locknut.
“This is a significant development, as until now we've usually found mobile Trojans two or three at a time at the most,” said Davidson in a formal announcement.
“It would be easy for a malware writer to create one Trojan and give it 52 different names; however, this is not the case here, where we have 52 separately cracked and infected applications. Somebody has gone to an awful lot of time and effort to turn these out,” he went on to say.
Davidson said new Symbian bugs arose at least once a month between June and October of last year, but the pace is now about once a week.
“Previous mobile viruses have either been able to spread but cause no harm or alternatively have been able cause significant harm but not able to spread,” he said. “It may be that producing large numbers of harmful Trojans such as those we discovered today is a reaction by the writers to their inability to produce destructive viruses that can effectively spread. Obviously by producing large numbers of these things you greatly improve the odds of someone actually downloading and installing them.”
