Bad enough: Summertime mosquitoes carrying treacherous infections. Comparable enough: Popular game Mosquito carrying an infection into your cell phone – the Mosquito dialer Trojan, which infects the game with code that messages pay-per-call numbers and leaves the owner with a swollen phone bill.
Affecting predominantly users of the Symbian operating system, Mosquito the dialer Trojan is one of those little bugs that someone might code and spread for either destructive reasons, like revenge, or for financial gain, like setting up a 900 number and charging six dollars a minute, with the coders and spreaders needing only a few hundred victims to make decent profit, according to InformIt.com.
"As a desktop analogy, many free porn web sites use browser-based exploits to infect PC users with dialer Trojans," InformIt.com said. "This is a classic example of dialer Trojans being used for financial gain. Dialer Trojans have been around on PCs for many years. Traditional PC dialer Trojans rely on the infected computer having a working modem, and the modem needs to be connected to a wall socket. It was only a matter of time before someone realized that coding dialer malware for computers that mostly rely on broadband was a waste of time. Such malware coders have now moved to cellular phones."
Indeed, earlier this summer, there appeared the first known worm to target smart phones, and potentially other mobile phones, even if the worm itself – known as Cabir – was said to present little enough actual threat and was likely created and disseminated to test whether such a bug could be viable, portending a new breed of cyberworms.
Symbian-based cell phones can run more code than earlier cell phones. And today's generation of cell phones, InformIt.com said, can now be used to play games, surf the Web, and do plenty more that you'd usually do on your desktop. Unfortunately, the IT news Website noted, it also means hackers and malware writers have more fields to play their little games on, too.
Symbian-based cellular phones offer the ability to run far more code than earlier cell phones. Cellular phones can now be used to play games, surf the Internet, and perform many other activities traditionally done from a desktop computer. While these features are useful for consumers, it also means that malware coders have an increasing scope in which to apply malicious code. Code that once worked only on desktop computers can now be ported easily to work on handheld devices running the Symbian OS.
