Symantec, a leading anti-virus company, completed a study on mobile phone apps currently on the Android Market. While the original mobile apps were placed without the trojans found, Symantec discovered a long list of apps that subsequently had trojans attached.
Mobile phone viruses were once considered urban legends, but computer viruses can infest any computing device, including smartphones and tablets – and laptops and PCs. Keep your mobile phone security measures active and current, and check for anti-virus updates every day you use your mobile phone or tablet to connect to the internet. If a virus is on your mobile device, it can spread to other users via email and file sharing as well as infect your own computer when you sync.
Symantec released the following list of app developers and specific apps that were found to contain trojans. The developers have been notified, so they can remove the added viruses found, Android.Countercrank and Android.TonClank from their basic apps that had been submitted cleanly to Android Market. Please note that the developers are not blamed for the trojan add-ins.
iApps7 Inc.: Counter Elite Force, Counter Strike Ground Force, CounterStrike Hit Enemy, Heart Live Wallpaper, Hit Counter Terrorist, Stripper Touch Girl.
Ogre Games: Balloon Game, Deal & Be Millionaire, Wild Man.
Redmicapps: Pretty Women Lingerie Puzzle, Sexy Girls Photo Game, Sexy Girls Puzzle, Sexy Women Puzzle.
Android.TonClank and Android.Countercrank have been confirmed to operate after the host app is downloaded and installed. They can not only cause malfunctions in the app and in the mobile phone or tablet, they can also steal personal information, including bank and credit card information, that is stored on the mobile device and send the information over the Internet.
Please be careful with any programme or app you download. Always run the software through your anti-virus program before operating it, and allow the anti-virus and anti-spyware programme to run complete scans on your mobile devices regularly and routinely.
If you don’t have a good anti-virus programme on your mobile phone, please make that one of the first things you load onto it before enjoying all that mobile computing has to offer on its good side.