Spyware geared toward stealing data from a mobile device has been spotted accompanying phone-infecting viruses; this early effort probably signals more sophisticated attacks are in the offing.
Cellular service providers and major Internet players like Google, Yahoo, and AOL all want to get more people using their services. There are tremendous profit opportunities they see in mobile services.
A public that has been mostly reluctant to pay exorbitant data services prices in the US has been a major roadblock to broader expansion of the mobile web surfing userbase. The true stars of the mobile Internet experience, smartphones like the Treo line, are a lot pricier than highly popular camera phones too.
We can add criminal threats to data safety on mobiles, not that we could not already. McAfee researcher Jimmy Shah documented the presence of an attempt to marry spyware with software like the MultiDropper series plaguing users of Symbian-based (as in Nokia and others) mobile devices:
SymbOS/Mobispy.A is based on an early version of commercial call and SMS recording software. SymbOS/Mobispy.A installs on a phone and records incoming and outgoing SMS messages. It also tracks the phone numbers of all dialed and received calls. The purchaser of the software gets an account on a central server. SymbOS/Mobispy.A sends all the data it's captured to that account.
Considering that data-stealing and other for-profit malware have made their entrance on mobile phones, it is worrisome to see spyware make its debut. Around eight months ago a commercial remote phone monitoring application was released. There was much speculation on how much time it would take for malware authors to integrate it into their own malware.
Fortunately, this initial spyware attempt will be limited by the attacker's choice of software. Shah noted that the software being used is only valid for one IMEI, so if the malware hits a different phone, the data it captures won't be available to the attacker.
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