4 Your Computer Repairs

Some of you may remember the good old days of dial up internet access and the pearls it brought with viruses.  The dreaded dialler virus where it would disconnect your modem from your ISP and then dial a premium rate number costing up to and sometimes over £1 per minute.  By the time you realised what had happened or you got your phone bill you quite often had to pay several hundred pounds after all dial up was slow and took a while to do anything online and if it had a lot of pictures then you had tine to make a coffee.  Now these people were clever in that they muted your modems speaker and had it done so quickly you just thought that it was taken a bit longer than normal to load a web page.

Well they are back but not for your computer but for your new shiny smart phone.  Security firms have noticed a rise in the amount Trojans known as diallers.  like their older relatives they dial premium rate numbers and you then get hit by a large bill and they get some of that money.

Writing on the CA security blog, Akhil Menon said

it was seeing a "an increasing trend of trojan diallers.

Mr Menon profiled one such virus, called Swapi.B, which sends premium SMS messages.

"The messages sent out are in the typical format to invoke premium services and land the mobile user with heavy mobile bills without the user’s knowledge and consent,"

Mikko Hypponen, head of research at F-Secure which makes security software for mobiles, said

it had seen a "handful" of diallers in recent months.

They were popular because they get round one of the big problems facing anyone wanting to make money out of Windows viruses.  PC malware can’t just directly steal money from your machine; it has to jump through hoops like keylogging your credit card number or sending spam.

However, mobile malware can just instantly steal from you by making premium-rate calls or messages.  Some diallers sent messages or rang many different numbers, including legitimate ones.

The trojan can place calls to, say, 100 different premium-rate numbers, only one of which is his own number.  How would you fight this? Shut down all the numbers, including the innocent ones?

A lot of people still think that you only get viruses by visiting porn sites but this is not true.  I have seen computers being infected from normal looking sites and even sites which are legitimate websites but had been hacked into and malicious code inserted but the overall look was not alerted.

If you want to protect your phone from this type of attack then you will need a mobile anti virus program.  F-secure make one and if you search around you will find others as well.

One Response to “Old viruses now targeting new Smartphone’s”