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]