New Symbian virus targets mobile banking service in Indonesia
By Dusan Belic on Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 at 2:02 AM PST In Security, Symbian
Kaspersky Lab detected a new malicious program for Symbian that targets customers of an Indonesian mobile phone operator. The Trojan-SMS.Python.Flocker has five known variants, from .ab to.af, and it’s written in Python.
If a phone is infected with it, the Trojan will send SMS messages to a short number with instructions to transfer part of the money in the user’s account to another account, which belongs to the cybercriminals.
The amounts transferred range from $0.45 to $0.90, hence if the cybercriminals behind the Trojan manage to infect a large number of phones, the total amount transferred to their mobile phone account could be quite substantial.
What is not clear, though, is which “flavor” Symbian OS they are talking about. UIQ? S60? Which versions?
Anyway, Kaspersky Labs’ Denis Maslennikov had this to say: “It seems that the focus on financial fraud in the mobile malware industry will only get more pronounced over time. Until recently, many people thought that malicious programs that send SMS messages without the user’s knowledge were a purely Russian phenomenon. Now we can see that the problem no longer affects only Russian users – it’s becoming an international issue.”
[Via: Cellular-News]
I read the source article from your link. It seems this is not a virus, but a trojan. The difference is that with a Trojan the user must run the application. A virus can propagate without user interaction.
Trojan’s are less of a worry to end-users.