Banking malware found on Android Marketplace

An application for smartphones running the Google Android operating system has been reported to steal users’ banking information.

 

According to a blog post from the First Tech Credit Union, an app developer called 09Droid created applications which posed as a shell for mobile banking applications, and in the process phished personal information about the users’s bank accounts. The information would, presumably, have been usen for the purposes of identity theft.

 

SophosLabs has not yet seen a sample of the malware, which has now been removed from the Android Marketplace, and First Tech Credit Union is at pains to point out to its customers that it does not currently have an app for the Android phone.

 

A number of other financial institutions have also published warnings regarding the Android applications. For instance, here’s a similar warning about the Android app that was published on the website of Travis Credit Union, and this is what the credit union posted on its official Facebook page:

Although malware has previously emerged for jailbroken iPhones (such as the infamous Rick-rolling Ikee worm) the malicious applications have not made it onto users’ iPhones via Apple’s highly guarded AppStore.

 

The Android marketplace, however, is not as closely monitored as Apple’s equivalent, and adopts a more “anything goes” philosophy. This, combined with the current buzz around new phones running Android such as the Motorola Droid and the Google Nexus One, may make the platform more attractive to cybercriminals in future.

 

As more and more users inevitably take advantage of smartphones to access their bank accounts in the future, the temptation for hackers to exploit systems may become greater.

 

by Graham Cluley, Sophos

 

Ikee worm author gets job at iPhone app firm

The author of the world’s first iPhone worm must be feeling pretty chirpy today, because he’s managed to get himself a job as an iPhone application developer.

 

21-year-old Australian Ashley Towns, revealed that he was going to join mogeneration (What is it with companies who insist on being spelt in lowercase? Does anyone really think that looks cutting-edge anymore?) on his Twitter feed earlier today.

 

Read more

First iPhone worm discovered – ikee changes wallpaper to Rick Astley photo

Apple iPhone owners in Australia have reported that their smartphones have been infected by a worm that has changed their wallpaper to an image of 1980s pop crooner Rick Astley.

 

The worm, which could have spread to other countries although we have no confirmed reports, is capable of breaking into jailbroken iPhones if their owners have not changed the default password after installing SSH. Once in place, the worm appears to attempt to find other iPhones on the mobile phone network that are similarly vulnerable, and installs itself again

 

On each installation, the worm – written by a hacker calling themselves “ikex” – changes the lock background wallpaper to an image of Rick Astley with the message:

ikee is never going to give you up

What’s clear is that if you have jailbroken your iPhone or iPod Touch, and installed SSH, then you must always change your root user password to something different than the default, “alpine”. In fact, it would be a good idea if you didn’t use a dictionary word at all.

 

The worm will not affect users who have not jailbroken their iPhones or who have not installed SSH.

SophosLabs is analysing the worm’s code, which suggests that at least four variants have been written so far. One of the attributes of the latest variant (labelled the “D” version) is that it tries to hide its presence by using a filepath suggestive of the Cydia application.

 

The source code is littered with comments from the author suggesting the worm has been written as an experiment. One of the comments berates affected users for not following instructions when installing SSH, because if they had changed the default password the worm would not have been able to infect them.

Presently it appears that the worm does nothing more malicious than spread and change the infected user’s lock screen wallpaper. However, that doesn’t mean that attacks like this can be considered harmless.

 

Accessing someone else’s computing device and changing their data without permission is an offence in many countries – and just as with graffiti there is a cost involved in cleaning-up affected iPhones.
Other inquisitive hackers may also be tempted to experiment once they read about the world’s first iPhone worm. Furthermore, a more malicious hacker could take the code written by ikee and adapt it to have a more sinister payload.

 

iPhone users may rush into jailbreaking their iPhones in order to add functionality that Apple may have denied to them, but if they do so carelessly they may also risk their iPhone becoming the target of a hacker.

 

My prediction is that we may see more attacks like this in the future. Indeed, only last week we saw hacked iPhones in the Netherlands being held hostage for 5 Euros.

 

Who wrote the ikee iPhone worm?

The source code of the worm says at its start:

/ "ikee virus" by ikex
/ Revision: 10 (Variant D)

A quick trawl of the Whirlpool forum where users are reporting that their iPhones are unexpectedly displaying an image of Rick Astley, reveals a user calling themselves “ike_x”.

 

According to ike_x’s user profile on the Whirlpool forum he is based in Sydney. Further searching on the internet reveals other pages seemingly related to ike_x of Sydney, using the name “Ash” or “Ashley Towns”. For instance, here is a MySpace page and this appears to be Ash/ikex on Twitter.

 

The worm’s author appears to have realised that people might be interested to learn why he wrote the worm, and posted this explanation inside the code:

Why?: Boredom, because i found it so stupid the fact that on my initial scan of my 3G optus range i found 27 hosts running SSH daemons, i could access 26 of them with root:alpine. Doesn't anyone RTFM anymore?

There is a certain irony in the notion that a hacker who says he was trying to expose sloppy security by the owners of jailbroken iPhones has done such a bad job of covering his own tracks..

 

Source of image of affected iPhone: Batman from the Whirlpool forums.

By Graham Cluley, Sophos