Symbian S60 attack appears again

The malicious programmers have just recently "created" a series of 3 new Trojans that attack mobile devices using Symbian S60 operating systems.

Security firm F-Secure said the Trojans are all Viver. New Trojans have been released on some popular online resource sharing sites. These Trojans are currently the most widespread in Russia.

When infecting Viver Trojan devices, they often disguise as an application program. Their goal is to send a lot of SMS messages beyond the level of forcing users to pay fees. Every message has an international code so most messages find the address even if the device is outside Russia.

Most of the previous Trojans like Wesber-A, Redbrowser, and Java Midlet are not able to automatically send SMS but want to send them to the device owner for permission. Also they cannot send messages internationally.

The Viver Trojan series is an improved stream of malware that surpasses the limitations of other Symbian S60 malware attacks. This is really a new "revolution" in mobile code programming techniques.

Currently malicious code to attack Symbian devices is still relatively rare and has not caused much harm such as malicious code on the PC. But the future will certainly not be inferior, especially when there is a boom in mobile devices today.

Hoang Dung