- What Is a Dialer Trojan?
- Mosquito, the Game That Plays the Player
- Detecting the Malicious Version of Mosquitoes v2
- Protection and Prevention
- References
Mosquito, the Game That Plays the Player
We first heard of the Mosquito dialer Trojan while researching online. Various web forum users were complaining that they had installed a game and now their phones were sending text messages to the number 87140 (see Figure 1). But some users hadn't noticed this problem, so it was evident that there were at least two discrete versions of this game in circulation—and that at least one of these versions was malware.
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Figure
1 Screenshot related to the
first known mention
of an infected Mosquito game.
The game that the infected users had installed was called Mosquito v2.0. The game is unique in that it uses the phone's built-in camera. The user walks around shooting mosquitoes in a virtual reality–like atmosphere. This game appeared to be a "cracked" version that appeared on the many cell phone warez and p2p networks that plague the Internet underground. It appeared that 87140 was a UK number costing a hefty £1.50 per text message.