With smartphone software getting more and more advanced, it's no surprise that with positives come the negatives, and one of those inevitable negatives was of course malware. The existence of malware on mobile phones is nothing new, with the first known application to show malware like behavior being iSexPlayer, which was discovered two years ago effecting Nokia's S60 devices which at the time were considered secure.
Although there has been many threats of malware for a wide array of mobile operating systems since then, it seems Android is the latest victim of a giant hollow Greek horse.
Kapersky has reported a new Trojan which has been going around the Internet recently which targets Android-based devices. The Trojan, which is known as Trojan-MS.AndroidOS.FakePlayer.a is disguised as a media player application which prompts the Android user to install a standard 13kb .APK file. Once installed, the Trojan will start spam sending SMS's to premium rate numbers from your phone without the user even being aware of their sudden bill rise.
Interestingly, it bares an incredible resemblance to what the iSexPlayer did to its victims. The iSexPlayer actually made unauthorized calls as opposed to spam SMS messages.
Don't go panicking right away though. The only way the Trojan can infect your device is by manually installing the application to the phone. So all it takes is a few tech-smarts, and making sure you don't download any non-trusted applications to your device.
Via: Techtree