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Trojan infests Symbian games phones: don't use pirate Mosquitos game!

by Guy Kewney | posted on 12 August 2004


You probably don't fancy discovering that your phone has quietly been sending premium-rate texts to someone you've never heard of. In that case, be careful which games you install; one of them is a Trojan which will do this, bleeding your account dry.

Guy Kewney

In particular, don't download "Mosquitos" except from legitimate sites. Symbian has announced that it "is aware that an illegally adapted or 'cracked' game called Mosquitos is being distributed by 'warez' websites (illegal software download sites) and on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks."

This game has been illegally adapted from the legitimate Mosquitos game developed by Ojom, says Symbian

You have to be determined to suffer. "The only way a phone can be affected by this problem is by deliberate installation of an illegal copy of the Mosquitos game, by the user; and installation of the game requires the user to ignore an explicit warning that the identity of the application developer is unknown," warns Symbian.

According to other sources, the Trojan function was not put in by another hacker, but was built into the software by the publisher.

"This functionality was supposed to be some kind of a copy-protecting technique, but it didn't work right and the whole functionality backfired," said the f-secure report.

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