New Android trojan records phone calls, shares with remote server(arstechnica.com)
arstechnica.com
New Android trojan records phone calls, shares with remote server
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/08/new-android-trojan-records-all-phone-calls.ars
5 comments
In other news, if you click INSTALL on an application that tells you it's touching ALL of your phone calls, it might do stuff you don't want with those phone calls.
/headdesk
/headdesk
...and believe it or not out of 100 Million Android users 1 Million will do exactly that.
Recording phone calls is useful to suspicious girlfriends, and about nothing else. I doubt any identity thief would listen to your phone calls in hopes that you mention a credit card number or something of value.
Recording phone calls using a trojan app would be useful to anyone who wants to gather information without having to get a legal wiretap: private investigators, unscrupulous reporters, intelligence agencies, organized crime syndicates, etc.
It'd be trivial to sort the calls by listening to a few seconds of each to identify potential high value phone numbers (banks, florists, catalogue ordering lines, etc), then listen to every call to the high-value numbers.
This is an app (application) and not the classic definition of Trojan Horse virus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_horse_(computing)
Let me see if I can recap on the main points.
1) There supposedly is software that doesn't appear to exist anywhere outside of a research lab.
2) This software as written doesn't actually do what it is reported nefariously to do because it is bugged.
3) It clearly declares the capabilities it intends to use to the user via a standard install screen which can be declined.
In summation, there may or may not be a program somewhere that isn't currently functional and of which the true intent is unknown.
If the above is accurate then I might have reports of thousands of trojans across various operating systems, or maybe I don't, who knows!