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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."
Windows virus writers strike again.
Just like to point out that as the UK is not part of the eurozone euros are not the currency of the UK; the cost is roughly £4 per minute (which equates to roughly 5 euro or roughly 6 US dollars).
...how they even *found* numbers in the Antarctic. It's not like you can set up a phone line down there, and I can't imagine many people would have occasion to call the Antarctic.
Air is just like fog, but it's not gray.
That's because Antarctica has no nations to be international with. There are however plenty of research stations there with people who like to talk to mom n dad on the holidays.
*DrugCheese rants*
You are retarded. That article says "In Antarctica dialing is dependent on the parent country of each base:", ie: there is no main country code for Antarctica, but there are phone numbers, the country code used depends on the research base.
This is almost triggering nostalgia. I remember the good old days where viruses were actually malicious to the system they were installed on. None of this run silently in the background bot zombie we'll use your resources if we need it to further our own gain crap.
In the good old days a virus just wasn't a virus if it didn't format your C: on some arbitrary birthday of the writer, or nuke your master boot record, or even copy itself to the master boot record so that when you started up the computer said Suck It! Rather than displaying the Windows 3.11 loading screen. Man it sucked re-installing dos and windows from floppies.
Nerds can enjoy the same joke over and over for periods much longer than 10 years. It means we don't need to spend a lot of money on entertainment, assuming of course that we actually did spend money on entertainment instead of pirating it. Did I mention that peg legs and eye patches ARRR still funny, too?
I guess that whole "Is your refrigerator running" crank would be sort of un-funny given the circumstances....
Frankly, the kiddie vandal stuff was way less dangerous than the pro-level sneaky botnet crap we put up with now. Yeah, it sucked for the target(whereas, with a sufficiently powerful machine, your modern malware victim can limp along for months); but diseases virulent enough to kill their hosts swiftly don't spread as well, and don't have time to spam.
It would be ugly, for a while; but if more modern viruses nuked their hosts, as opposed to quietly lurking and spamming, the internet would be a safer, cleaner, place today.
This isn't freeware. It was a shareware version of a "pay" game that was cracked and injected with malware. Why does the summary make it look like freeware is more dangerous than pay-to-play? This is just another case where warez is more dangerous than legitimate software.