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With the proliferation of Android and no lock on the source/s from which an app can be installed, malicious apps are slowly making there way in to the Android app ecosystem that resides outside the Google-run MarketPlace for Android Apps. After a recent scare where a lot of Android apps were found to suspicious and downright malicious, Kaspersky Labs (the people who make the Kaspersky suite security software) have found an Android app that is blatantly malicious.

According to the Kaspersky Labs report, the app looks like a normal, harmless media player app for Android but is actually a malicious trojan. It subscribes the owners mobile number to premium paid numbers and then ultimately transfers money from the phone owner’s account to the criminals. And it does all this while efficiently hiding all signs of what it is actually doing.

Kaspersky Labs has identified this app as Trojan-SMS.AndroidOS.FakePlayer.a. This app is available in an APK format and weighs only 13KB, thus making it as easy to install as possible. Interestingly, all identified cases of infected Android devices have been confined to inside Russia. So it looks like this might have been an attempt at creating a large botnet based on Android device and controlled by the Russian underground hackers. But the security experts also suggest that the apps often take advantage of the lack of scrutiny in the hand of users.

Some of these malicious apps do in fact ask the permission of the owner before subscribing to a premium number, banking on the fact that a lot of users will just blindly agree to it without reading what it is really asking permission for.

As predicted by a lot of security experts and industry analysts in general — the current generation of advanced mobile phones are very easy and profitable targets for malware and the malware distributors are wasting no time in trying to capitalize on it.

[via]