Trojaned Mosquito bites PDA users

Mosquito, a popular game for camera phones running the SymbianOS (which includes the Nokia 3650, 7650 and N-Gage phones), positions a mosquito in the viewfinder. The object of the game is to center the mosquito in the viewfinder and shoot it. The game is is so popular - and so hard to find - that many have resorted to downloading cracked versions of the game on P2p filesharing networks like Kazaa. The problem is, many of the free versions have been Trojaned by a dialer. While the user is happily shooting mosquitos, the Trojan is surreptiously mounting charges by secretly dialing a premium rate number.

Dubbed Mosquit by antivirus vendor Kaspersky, SymbOS/QDial26 by McAfee, and Trojan.Mos by Symantec, the Trojan is being heralded by many as a new discovery. In fact, reports of infection from the Mosquito Trojan date back to at least March 16, 2004, when a poster to a Geekzones forum complained about the problem.

In an interesting twist, Symbian has admitted that the dialer Trojan was deliberately placed there by the developer. According to a Symbian press release, "the SMS functionality was incorporated in early versions of the game by the legitimate manufacturer as an experimental licensing and copy protection mechanism."

The premium rate number the dialer attempted to contact has since been disabled. However, users affected by the deliberately Trojaned software will still incur charges as their phone attempts to send hidden SMS messages.