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Mobile Game Trojan Calls the South Pole
UgLyPuNk writes with an excerpt from Gamepron.com: "Freeware games can actually cost you more money than their pay-to-play cousins, as mobile gamers in the UK have learned. A 'booby-trapped' version of a popular Windows Mobile game has been sneakily spending their money while they sleep – by dialing phone numbers in the Antarctic behind their backs."
I originally modded you up - and then I did a search of my own.
http://countrycode.org/antarctica
Seems Wikipedia is not right about everything - go figure.
dnuof eruc rof aixelsid
And decent phones do. On a BlackBerry, for example, you have to specifically authorize each application to access to the voice radio, IP connections (as a whole or per-domain), GPS, address book, etc. It's easy to use and provides great protection, not to mention the instant insight into what a program is actually doing (i.e. "Why does this free calculator want to connect to warez.ru"). Why WindowsCE doesn't do such things is a complete mystery.
+88234 is allocated to our company Global Networks Switzerland AG who operates a GSM network in Antarctica. The +88234 allocation is published by the ITU in the E.164 standard somewhere around 2003. As Antarctica is not considered a country according to the united nation but international territories, the +88234 allocation is out of the shared country codes block which is where you also find the satellite networks such as GlobalStar, Thuraya etc and also networks operating on Cruise Ships and similar. This is the main reason why operators charge a fortune. They don't differentiate +88234 in pricing from other networks in +882xx or +881xx which means you get charged sattelite connections even though our connection is much cheaper (and they make a hell of a lot of money off you). The connectivity to Antarctica goes over satellite to the edge of Antarctica to a research station (you can't reach the center over satellite). There is a second allocation +672 for antarctica for the australian Scott's base which is basically some kind of areacode of Australia. We have nothing to do with that network.
About the abuse of the number for so called auto-dialers, malware in games etc, please be aware that we are not involved in this. People somewhere in the middle do break out those calls and terminate it illegally on their equipment charging termination fees and making money of it. Those calls do not end up on our switch where they would supposed to go. The numbers used in the dialers are not in use in our network so calling them would result in a "unallocated number" error and you would not have been charged.
If you get charged for calls to +88234-8.... complain to the operator as it clearly points to shortstopping by a 3rd party.
Our legitimate users use mainly +88234-7xxx xx xx with a few allocations in +88234-4... and +88234-5...
Regards
Andreas Fink
CEO
Global Networks Switzerland AG
afink at gsm.aq