RedBrowser, Java based trojan in the wild!

Mar 02 2006 - 09:46 AM ET | In The News, Miscellaneous, PDA Phone, SMS, Smartphone

According to Moscow based Kaspersky Labs, a new Trojan horse that is able to infect almost any mobile phone or PDA is in the wild. The Trojan called "RedBrowser" targets traditional mobile phones running Java as well as the newer generation of SmartPhones.

The Trojan dupes users by offering free Internet browsing, but instead sends text messages to premium rate services, with users being charged as high as $5.00 to $6.00 dollars per message.

RedBrowser can run on any new phone or PDA that runs Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME), Sun Microsystems flavor of Java for mobile devices.

To date the variant looks to be contained in Russia, as it appears to have been written to infect the Russian market. Security experts are concerned that a Trojan such as this, could easily be written and circulated on the Internet, making a larger and more widespread problem for mobile users.