Mobile game trojan calls the South Pole
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 dialling phone numbers in the Antarctic behind their backs.
3D Anti Terrorist Action
Described as a “mobile version of the classic Counter-Strike“, the pirated title contains hidden code which has been silently ringing numbers in the Antarctic block, the Dominican Republic, Somalia and other premium locations, simple calls which cost roughly 5 euro (more than US$6) per minute from a UK mobile phone.
The original game – 3D Anti Terrorist Action – was released as a shareware demo, before Russian virus artists got a hold of it, made a few tweaks and then published a freeware version, containing their dialler – Trojan.WinCE.Terdial.a.
The dodgy dialler was discovered back in March, but as the pirated game makes its way to more and more websites offering free Windows mobile applications, it’s still making calls, and taking advantage of people looking to get something for nothing.
It seems that mobile phone tricks are gaining in popularity as virtually everything done on the phone will incur a charge – then it’s just a matter of siphoning part of that cash flow back to the developers… much better rate of return than Nigerian scam emails!
In fact, Kaspersky Labs reports that the growth rate for PC viruses and trojans has been flattening in the past three years, but they have seen more than 200% growth in mobile threats.
Obviously, common sense dictates a pretty simple way to avoid this – don’t play mobile games you’ve found on random sites, and make sure you’re completely informed about what you’re installing onto your handset. If you’re truly concerned, blocking international dialling from your mobile may also be a smart option. However, if this is all a bit late and you’re infected – the XDA developers forum contains a few tips on how to remove the trojan.
…incidentally, we hear that the game itself is pretty rubbish, just so you know.
7 Responses to “Mobile game trojan calls the South Pole”
Article Details
- published: May 31st, 2010
- by: Jessica Citizen
- in: Game: 3D Anti Terrorist Action, mobile gaming, Platform: Windows Mobile, scam, trojan, Trojan.WinCE.Terdial.a
- comments: 7
Author Bio:
I like video games, fishing, Depeche Mode, long walks on the beach, writing discussion papers and cups of tea. Not necessarily in that order.
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I can see some cold dude having to get out of bed, going…hello, hello, hello to each of the calls.
What a terrible website, coded by a fool! This site is broken, as it relies on the referer sent from the client to be correct. Never trust the client!
I do not send the correct referers, to protect privacy, and this site replaces graphics with a claim that “you stole this image….”. How egocentric do you have to be to think that someone would hotlink your shitty graphics? And how dumb do you have to be to think that if someone wanted your graphics, they wouldn’t just save them?
I could just put an exception for this site, but I won’t be coming back.
As for being burnt by this trojan… well, that’s the kind of thing that is inevitable on proprietary computing platforms. Proprietary platforms exist to make money for the writer, and long term they need to keep users using their platforms. Therefore, the platform is designed to be able to do what the user thinks they want to do, but does so whilst not empowering the user at all. This means that the user becomes reliant on that platform, and if you can get them to spend time and money on software for that platform, they will have even fewer reasons to change to a different, unempowering, proprietary platform. Or worse, and FOSS platform that (in theory[1]) will be empowering software.
The proprietary software industry, on mainframe, micro, and personal computers, has made some very rich and powerful companies. The same ideas are now being used on the next smallest computers, mobile phones. And we are seeing exactly the same downsides as in the past (diallers on PCs were a problem in the mid-90s), with the added complication of ubiquitous communication, and mass-market numbers of users.
[1] Many big FOSS projects, aiming for mass-market appeal, make the mistake of copying proprietary software’s techniques. The then accidentally ruin the software. Take Firefox – it has been utterly wrecked whilst chasing IE users. It has become hand-holdy, dumbed-down, and shiny-shiny, and worst of all is that Mozilla need money to promote FF. This has meant getting into bed with for-profit corporations, and so the browser’s features get influenced by their interests (more than the user’s interests). As the advertising company Google is their biggest benefactor, FF is getting more and more features that are advertiser friendly, like the geolocation shit. Only the dumbest of consumers will think that adverts are in their interest!
Well firstly, sorry for the image redirect. We are a very small site, and quite frankly we keep doing a pretty good job at getting news quickly. This is great for the site but we have also had a lot of issues with larger sites than ours hotlinking directly to our image files. When we were on a small network (10mbits) this became a big problem as it was exhausting our link so we needed to stop it. We are no longer on that network so it isn’t really a problem anymore, I’ve removed the code so for that small paranoid bunch who don’t like using referrers like the rest of the world it shouldn’t be a problem any more.
As for the rest, different strokes for different folks, I see no issues with making things more appealing for a mass market as long as it doesn’t destroy performance, or functionality for the tweakers.
If you modify the referrer check to allow blank referrers, in addition to referrers from your own site, you should satisfy people that hide their referrer.
However, if they are purposely sending the wrong referrer to “protect their privacy”, I can’t see why they should be permitted to see the images.
yer we allowed none and blanked referrers, so he must have been sending a false referrer…paranoid
What happens to your recycling bin files when your computer gets a Trojan and crashes? My hard drive crashed because of a Trojan virus. what happens to the recycling bin files do they get lost forever or do they come back.
depending on how your system crashed you may have lost them. eg if you needed to intstall them