Spyware for cellphones

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/#00000844

Wednesday, March 29, 2006
First Trojan Spy for Symbian Phones Posted by Jarno @ 16:19 GMT

------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
----
----

Today we heard of a rather interesting new Symbian malware  
application named
Flexispy.A. It's a Symbian trojan spy that records information about the
victim's phone calls and SMS messages, then sends them to a remote  
server.

What makes this interesting is that Flexispy.A is a trojan spy  
written by a
company for commercial reasons. The company claims that it's a useful  
tool
for catching a cheating spouse. By installing the application on the  
phone
they can monitor to whom the victim is calling and what SMS messages  
he or
she is sending. The company even claims that Flexispy is not a trojan.

However, this application installs itself without any kind of  
indication as
to what it is. And when it is installed on the phone it completely hides
itself from the user. So the application could easily be used by malware
installing it as part of its payload, or a hacker could simply send  
it to a
victim over Bluetooth and trust that there are enough curious people to
install it.

Not to mention the fact that spying on people's private communication is
illegal in most countries around the world. And the fact that all of the
information is stored on the FlexiSpy servers, puts the company in a  
rather
interesting light.

So yes, FlexiSpy is indeed a trojan and we have added the detection  
to our
F-Secure Mobile Anti-Virus so that any user who has a phone that has  
been
infected with this trojan will get a warning that someone is spying  
on them.


_______________________________________________
EPIC_IDOF mailing list
EPIC_IDOF () mailman epic org
https://mailman.epic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/epic_idof


-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as lists-ip () insecure org
To manage your subscription, go to
 http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip

Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/