How to make money with mobile malware

Graham Cluley
Graham Cluley
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Remember the old days of dialler Trojan horses?

Back when most of us didn’t have broadband at home, and connected to the internet via a modem, we saw a type of malware which could take advantage of the phone line plugged into the back of your PC and dial an expensive premium rate number.

In this way, criminal hackers could make money out of your infected computer – and you might know anything about it until you received an expensive telephone bill.

Dialler Trojan horses went the way of the dinosaur as consumers turned their back on modem connections and adopted broadband en masse.

But, as F-Secure’s Mikko Hypponen explained today at the Virus Bulletin conference, the threat may have returned in a different form through the use of virtual premium rate numbers.

Earlier this year I described the Terdial Trojan horse, which was distributed posing as a Windows mobile game…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.

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