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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."
aw man, that's pretty cold.
and what did they say ?
I always thought Microsoft made a bit of a branding error when it came to naming their mobile OS. "WinCE" just invites all kinds of negative associations, and stories like this one just add to the painful image.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
....how about a nice game of Ice Station Zebra?
...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.
Crappy brain dead design strikes again.
Why on earth are mobile phone apps even allowed to make calls in the first place, without some sort of specificaly made user authorization?
Surely that should be something that has to be done on a per-application basis, and only after the user has allowed it by entering an authorization password to allow the app to access those parts of the phone!?
There should also be a way to limit the number or costs of calls (per application) that is built in at the lowest possible level too.
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+88234-86-7-53-0-9
Simmilar examples can be found in:
1.) Back in the good old days of dial-up, there were adult sites that would give "free" access assuming you (stupidly/unknowingly) dialed into a south-pacific island nation number that had a north American prefix, with your unlimited long distance account.*
2.) All the cell joke and ring tone numbers you can "get for free" that are/were advertised on TV.
*my brother found out about this the hard way
I don't know about angles, but it's fear that gives men wings. -Max Payne
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
I saw this on the BBC website too, but neither article tells me how it is to the advantage of the hackers to give random people big telephone bills. Do the hackers own some little phone company which the calls are going through? Do they have some overpriced premium number connecting to a computer in Scott Base which recites astrology readings in a synthetic voice?
More seriously: why should the phone OS allow a game to initiate phone calls? (I really hope the answer is 'the OS has a bug' rather than 'that's how they designed it.')
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
the problem is that a secure design would show a popup like:
do you want to call this 00431341424345 number with your modem (yes/no/always allow this number) every time the modem driver engage
instead windows 7/vista shows us a popup like:
the application solitaire.exe requires you authorization to continue (yes/no)
and that popup is so common that users click trough it without a second thought.
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.
That country code is for Australia (they have one code for Australia proper, and one for external territories, which includes the Antarctic station). Most countries use their own country code for their Antarctic territories, but Australia is the exception. The only people you'll get with that country code are Australians, and none of the other research stations, so I'm not sure I'd say that Antarctica has its own country code.
Learn to love Alaska
One of the problems with mobile apps is the "allow and install" vs "deny and not install". You read the list of privileged operations and you are left with a tough decision and no middle ground - which would be "deny and still install". If I read the list of requested privileged applications I often get a shiver.
It's how .NET CF's telephony API works. You call a function, send it a number as a parameter, and it dials it. As long as I can remember, that's pretty much been how you call that particular .NET CF function. At least, that's how it worked in 2005 with .NET CF 1.0. So basically, that particular hole has been there for probably about 5 years. Since most mobile phones run a slightly older than latest version of .NET CF, I'd imagine that quite a few phones would be vulnerable to that. That said, the main reason it doesn't prompt for verification is because a lot of big companies, carriers, major third party dev houses, etc. most likely demanded that they be able to "phone home" seamlessly and quietly for various reasons or they wouldn't support their platform.
I know, you're probably thinking "what reasons"? Well, from some of the vendors I've worked with, it ranges from location based information to cell phone recovery tracking to remote programming. None of it is absolutely necessary given current available technology and that you can do all that stuff over the data network, but when Windows CE was originally designed, data networks weren't quite as useful.
Well that's helpful. I tried googling the phone number to see what I could find.
Google told me the answer was 88,079.
Thanks Google.
Running any application on your phone from untrusted sources produces unexpected results. Clip at 11.
What I don't exactly see is how they're profiting off the number.
There are plenty of providers of international premium rate numbers that will ask no questions about the callers and deposit a percentage of the call termination fees into a bank account at the end of the month - the article mentions they used Somalia ($0.14/min), Dominica (€0.45/min), Antarctica (€0.46/min). The provider I linked to was the top of Google's search - you can probably find others offering higher rates.
It should be a simple matter to follow the money back to the source of the problem
Not really. These crimes cross multiple legal jurisdictions, and there is no evidence to tie the trojan writer to the person profiting from the calls. Authorities in, say, Switzerland, will not break the banking secrecy of an individual just because they profited from running a premium rate phone number.
I remember hearing a story back in the early 90s about a French guy who had over 30 land lines installed in his house, and had set up an automated blueboxing dialler to call international premium rate numbers 24/7. Allegedly, he was earning $1.50/min from each call, and he quickly became a millionaire.
The island of Diego Garcia used to be a favourite for such phone scams. Phone companies have international agreements to tranfer money, a portion of what they bill for international calls. In the case of the scam calls to Diego Garcia the money could be siphoned off by middlemen because Diego Garcia did not have agreements with all phone companies (bad credit rating?) and the money was routed indrectly. Something similar is happening here. The Irish Communications Regulator blocked direct dial calls to a list of countries to cut down on such fraud http://news.cnet.com/Ireland-launches-phone-fraud-crackdown/2100-1036_3-5377387.html
... software bug ....
Oh I hardly think that likely...
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.
Android's permissions are either all or nothing when it comes to Internet access. And some apps just ask for that permission for no real reason.
Best way to deal with that is to have a rooted phone and Droidwall. However, this won't protect against an app that was installed that was given capabilities of dialing and sending/receiving SMS/MMS items.
Another item to have is an app called autostarts. You would be surprised on what apps want to hook where.
It seems the developer was a little. *puts on sunglassses* cold blooded. YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH