Man, this Android stuff is getting messy. The number of Virus, Trojans and bad ass apps are growing in Android Market. Whatever Google is doing to kick the bad stuff from Android Market is continuously challenged by the bad guys.
Researcher at Computer Associates, have found a nasty Android Trojan that not only tracks all your incoming & outgoing calls details in a text file but also records the voice of conversation on to your memory cards. The voice calls are recorded in an “amr” file, a file format that is widely used on mobile devices to store spoken audio. What if this app calls home and uploads all your phone conversation to its servers? Very much scary stuff!
The researcher says
We have been recently blogging about many Android malware as the threat landscape has been witnessing an increasing trend in targeting the mobile platforms and today we have received an Android package to our collection and observed that this piece of malware walks an additional mile by having a neat configuration and has a capability to record the telephonic conversation the infected victim makes. In one of our earlier blogs, we have demonstrated how a Trojan logs all the details of incoming/outgoing calls and call duration in a text file. This Trojan is more advanced as it records the conversation itself in “amr” format. Also it has got many other malicious activities that we have seen in many of the earlier malware incidents targeted for Android platform.
Apple’s iPhone & iPad apps are tightly controlled by their stringent rules and so far we have not seen even a single bad ass app that slipped into an iPhone or iPad. Incidents like this prove that Steve Jobs is correct in highly controlling iOS environment to make it safe.
Photo by Johan Larsson.