An anti-virus company whose specialty is Symbian cell phone systems says a Trojan horse program containing a number of malicious programs – and disguised as the game Metal Gear Solid – is spreading over the Symbian system has been discovered.
SimWorks CEO Aaron Davidson says “The Metal Gear Trojan is yet another example of the increasing sophistication of developers of malware for the Symbian platform," said SimWorks chief executive Aaron Davidson, announcing the discovery of MetalGear.A. "The Metal Gear Trojan uses the same icon disabling
technique pioneered by the recent Skulls trojan, this time to disable specific
anti-virus and file browsing applications”.
MetalGear.A is also said to install a version of the Cabir virus that spreads through the Bluetooth short-range wireless network protocol, SimWorks said.
In November, the Skulls Trojan was identified as also carrying a version of Cabir into cell phones, but MetalGear.A, unlike Skulls, won't try to spread itself but a file known as Sexxxy.sis to any Bluetooth-enabled cell phones within range, which will disable Symbian application selection buttons on the affected cell phones, SimWorks added.
“Once a user installs either MetalGear.A or Sexxxy.sis they will find it quite
difficult to repair," warned Davidson. "This is particularly so in the case of MetalGear.A, as it effectively disables all of the tools on the phone that a user would need to
actually undo the damage caused by the Trojan.”
SimWorks said they updated their antivirus programs to defend against both MetalGear.A and Sexxxy.sis.
