French sms trojan creator arrested
October 19, 2012 by Network Security
Filed under News
A 20-year-old from Amiens, France, has somehow depleted around half a million of euros (over $650,000) by developing and releasing a Trojan cloaked as legitimate Android app.
He was busted not long ago in his home town, where the teenager was downloading the apps from third-party websites, hack them in order to innoculate the Trojan, and then reintroduced them on the websites.
After the app was downloaded and run, the resident Trojan would, without noticed, send 30 sms’s to a premium-rate number and in return it would receive an SMS code to play in online lotteries. The Trojanized app would redirect the message to the youngster, that would use these codes for playing.
The amount of money depleted from all the 17,000 users that without being aware downloaded the malware might not seem big, but the hacker’s profits would have been big if he could actually transfer the money somehow. According to the Europa1 report he did not win in those lotteries games.
He also admitted that he is guilty when he was arrested by the agents from the Central Office for the Fight against Crime Linked to Information Technology and Communication (OCLCTIC), telling them that his motivation was not the money, but his love for computers.
As the report said, he never studied computer science, but he would like to turn into a software developer.
The young is not the first French to become arrested for spreading SMS Trojans – in February. Two other men got arrested in Bobigny, a small city in the northeastern suburbs of Paris, for developing and releasing the Foncy Trojan.
