Majority of Mobile Malware Now Reliant On Toll Fraud

Posted by timothy on Sunday September 9, 2012 @09:34PM from the reverse-the-charges-operator dept.

CowboyRobot writes "Spyware is no longer the primary concern with unwanted software on mobile devices. According to mobile security firm Lookout, most mobile malware performs 'toll fraud' — billing victims using premium SMS services. The problem is very geographically-dependent, worst in areas with weak SMS regulation, particularly China, Ukraine, and Russia, where users are 10,000 times more likely to have malware on their phones than users in Japan, for example. Other risks include mobile ads surreptitiously uploading personal data, as well as apps that download other malware without users knowing. The full report is available."

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Root cause by geekmux · 2012-09-09 23:32 · Score: 0, Offtopic

Phone malware is reliant upon toll fraud?
No, not really. Phone malware is reliant upon users who think they need to carry around their lives in the plam of their hands. It's also reliant on the greed of vendors who think that every single "phone" in the universe needs to have at least 4,027 features to compete with every other vendor, (oh, and also so they can try and charge you for 4,026 of them.)
Go figure what happens when you increase your attack vector to the size of a commercial airline runway. Maybe we can stop calling these personal tracking superdevices "phones" now, because the only thing my old-fashioned phone could ever get "infected" with is rust.