Hacking Exposed Mobile

CHAPTER 5MOBILE MALWARE

The problem of mobile malware has evolved along with mobile devices for over a decade. Early examples of mobile malware either were proof of concept and merely spread for the sake of propagation or contained overtly malicious payloads. These pieces of malware were likely created out of misplaced intellectual curiosity or to increase the notoriety of their authors. Consider LibertyCrack, a Trojan horse masquerading as pirated software for Palm OS devices (identified in 2000), that performed an unwanted “hard-reset” of the device to restore it to factory defaults when executed. Or consider the first known computer worm affecting mobile devices: Named Cabir, it spread to other Symbian devices by sending itself within an SIS ...