Five new variants of a mobile trojan known as ZitMo have been discovered, targeting BlackBerry and Android mobile devices. A trojan is a type of software posing as an authentic application, but which actually conceals an item of malware). The worrying development is that four of these new variants target BlackBerry devices, which typically have gone untouched by hackers until now.
ZitMo (short for 'Zeus in the mobile'), which first appeared two years ago, is designed to steal the one-time passwords that some banks send via text message to mobile users as an additional layer of security. Once installed, the bogus app intercepts all incoming text messages and forwards them to a remote server.
The latest samples are targeting users in Germany, Spain and Italy.
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