A foreign virus is draining the accounts of smartphone owners in Ukraine through text messages

Photo: Aleksei Solodunov

A mass virus has been infecting Ukrainian smartphones since August 29. An expert of the Kaspersky Lab Roman Unuchek told Capital that this is a new type of the Trojan virus. Mobile telecommunications operators and users whose phones got infected labeled it «Hello. Here’s a photo for you...»

Spying and stealing

The virus infects the operating system of Android smartphones. «It spreads through downloading a malicious link contained in text messages (sms), which could come from other infected smartphones,» says an expert of information security at Kyivstar on condition of anonymity. Text messages with the virus also come to iPhone handsets with the operating system iOS and other systems.

No harm done

Unuchek says that after being launched the Trojan goes directly to the «control center» to obtain a new command. The possible tasks include mailing spam to numbers on the list of contacts, sending premium sms, request for stealing the contact list, blocking incoming/outgoing calls, stealing incoming text messages, calling a specified number, downloading and installation of specified software. This means that the virus can not only steal personal data, but easily drain accounts. «The damage for a subscriber is the price of one text message multiplied by the number of contacts. The virus sends the list of contacts from the address book of a subscriber and other personal information to the servers of attackers,» Head of the PR Department at MTS Ukraine Viktoriya Ruban noted.

Android on the other side

Hundreds of smartphone owners fall victim to the virus on a daily basis. «At the moment, we cannot estimate the number of the users who suffered from the virus. According to our data Ukraine accounts for 33% of the virus attacks, while Russia — 39%,» says Unuchek. «Earlier, Belarus and Uzbekistan faced a similar scumware. The sms-virus came to Ukraine most probably from foreign communication networks,» said the representative of Kyistar.

Over the past years, the number of smartphones based on the Android operating system has been rapidly growing in Ukraine. As of the end of Q2 2014, there were 9.4 mn smart handsets in the three largest mobile networks, while the total number of smartphones in the mobile networks amounted to 14 mn. Their use, however, does not always guarantee data safety.

As Capital wrote, last year Ukraine was ranked third in the world in terms of the number of smartphones infected by different viruses. The information was published by antivirus software developer NQ Mobile in mid-2013. Ukraine accounted for 6% of all infected smart devices. Only Russia and China were placed ahead of Ukraine in the rating.

Mobile telecommunication operators are powerless in fighting against the spread of viruses on smartphones. They are trying to bring the Trojan virus under control and notify subscribers about the danger. «We recommend to never open links to unknown or suspicious websites, which are received in the text messages even from people that you know,» says the expert of information security at Kyivstar.