Russian security vendor Kaspersky Lab this morning is sounding the alarm about an overseas mobile-phone scam that smacks of the movie "Office Space" and may portend future dangers for global users.
It may also add grist to an ongoing debate here, namely: What is the risk/reward ratio as mobile phones come to handle more and increasingly sophisticated financial transactions?
From the Kaspersky press release:
Last week, Kaspersky Lab experts detected a new malicious program for Symbian that targets customers of an Indonesian mobile phone operator. The Trojan is written in Python, a script language. It sends SMS messages to a short number with instructions to transfer part of the money in the user's account to another account, which belongs to the cybercriminals.
There are five known variants of Trojan-SMS.Python.Flocker, from .ab to.af. The amounts transferred range from $0.45 to $0.90. Thus, if the cybercriminals behind the Trojan manage to infect a large number of phones, the amount transferred to their mobile phone account as a result could be quite substantial.
