There is a lot of press attention at the moment regarding smartphones like android and the iphone and malicious apps. The disappointing thing about all this is that it appears to be mainly hype from antivirus companies who want a piece of the growing smartphone market pie.
Kaspersky’s mobile research group have discovered and named a ‘trojan’ that sends sms’s to premium rate numbers without the users consent and drains their credit. The trojan is named Trojan-SMS.AndroidOS.FakePlayer (http://www.kaspersky.com/news?id=207576152). The trojan is a app that is made to look like a media player apparently, but asks for access to sms services functionally.
So instead of waiting for the forthcoming kaspersky bloatware that will protect us all from this evil threat (ourselves mainly), we could just pay attention to the services requested by apps and use the built in security functionality to spot ‘trojans’ and not install them.
I predict instead of a few unsuspecting people quickly dismissing the built in security warnings of the android OS and loosing some credit to these trojan apps, thousands will instead give credit to kaspersky to ‘prevent’ it happening and slow their smartphones down, while still being vulnerable to a lot of threats, in the process.