14 DAY TRIAL // Two men were arrested last Friday in Bobigny, France, on suspicion of being the ones that developed an Android Trojan which sent SMSs to premium rate number, infecting the smartphones of 2,000 individuals.
According to L’Informaticien, after a two-month investigation, authorities managed to identify the alleged crooks and apprehend them. It’s estimated that the Foncy Trojan earned them around $150,000 (134,000 EUR), for each message charging the unsuspecting phone owner with around $6 (4.5 EUR).
The amount was obtained from the victims starting with the summer of 2011 when the malicious element was created. Now, the suspects are indicted for organized fraud and possession of a piece of malware.
Back in November 2011, Foncy was analyzed by Kaspersky Lab experts who determined that the malware was designed to target users from countries such as Belgium, France, Switzerland, Luxemburg, Germany, Spain and Canada.
At the time it was determined that the alerts the Trojan sent to its masters to inform them on the number of victims were actually sent to a number in France.
Later, at the middle of January 2012, the same Foncy Trojan was spotted by Kaspersky experts as hiding in a five megabyte file that was masquerading itself as the Madden NFL 12 game. Researchers found that in this scenario the Android malware was paired up with other payloads such as a root exploit and an IRC bot.
The large amounts of money illegally obtained by cybercrooks are a good reason for them to develop such pieces of malware and strategically place them in locations where the chances for someone to stumble upon them are high.
That is why smartphone owners are advised to ensure that their devices have an up-to-date antivirus solution running. Also, users must verify the permissions requested by an Android app before it’s installed. If it asks for too many rights, it's most likely malicious.