The Spinning Donut

Helping People Use Technology

The “Find and Call” Trojan: Apple and Google’s Actions

By

Find and Call Trojan

This is a guest post by Travis Ramsy. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Apple had to suffer it quite strangely. Both Apple and Google have been targeted by the malware “Find and call”. They responded pretty quickly by taking the Trojan off their stores – AppStore and Google Play. Just as an email spammer, the “Find and Call” Trojan is a malware that sends messages to people from your contact list, but masquerades as a contact management application.

This Trojan was found by the people at the Kaspersky labs. It is not a worm as it looks like at first. Instead, it is a Trojan that uploads your phonebook onto a remote server, and it is the server that replicates the malware and sends the spam to all your contacts and friends by SMS. The trouble of course is that it sends it with your name in the addressee field which means that your friends will probably trust you and open and download the app.

Though Google and iOS have removed the malware from their stores, it is kind of surprising that it got through their internal security and app store security. It is not news to Android which had to suffer many such attacks. Android users have learnt to be careful through experience.

However, it is news for the iOS supported devices and their users. Apple has always prided on its security by claiming not many malwares can get past its secure networks. While this has been true in the past, the trend seems to be changing with a simple tricky malware “Find and Call” slipping its way through the filters. There is the Flashback Trojan which is a more serious problem for Apple than the “Find and Call”.

“Find and Call” is relatively a simple bug. All they had to do was remove it from their stores, and Google and Apple were sitting pretty. But for a company like Apple, and for giants like Google, it is important to figure out their security issues. Google has rolled out a new trial doc to explain what areas it will venture into apart from the existing ones and those beyond search engines. We hope one of them is internet security.

As for Apple, first it’s a simple one like “Find and Call”, then more malicious malware like Flashback Trojan. Who knows what it is going to be next? Apple needs to get its act together to detect malware at source and not allow it into the public domain through the AppStore if it wants to retain its reputation as the “most secure operating system” provider. After all, that was initially the most charming aspect of the iOS.

About the Author: Travis Ramsy is the author and works with www.buycharter.com – a site that offers savings and current information on Charter Communications.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Malware should never be under-estimated and definitely not when they could be included in the app stores. ‘Find and call’ is a malware? I thought it was an app that could dial up a number without searching for the contact details on the phone.

  2. So ‘Find and call’ clerify the picture of Apple ios as they were known as the most secure network provider but this malware knocked them off. Apple should take it seriously and make their security tight enough to prevent happening of such incidents in future.

  7. Is there any substitute for this so-called app? And yet I think Apple and Google aren’t smart enough to get rid of the trojan and thus deleted the whole.

  9. So ‘Find and call’ clerify the picture of Apple ios as they were known as the most secure network provider but this malware knocked them off. Apple should take it seriously and make their security tight enough to prevent happening of such incidents in future.

  10. Extremely interesting article, blog added to your favorites 🙂 I hope that in the future even more interesting write posts.

  12. both companies need to increase there security in thr store, i think this will make more hackers to think about new approach of hacking.