A mobile application for Google's Android smartphones can secretly record users' phone calls and transmit them to malicious hackers, security researchers have found.
Once downloaded by a user, the app – which the researcher has not named, but seems to have a name relating to "System Messages" – surreptitiously stores a recording of the user's incoming and outgoing calls to the phone's memory card, according to the New York-based security experts CA Technologies.
In a blog post unveiling the finding, researcher Dinesh Venkatesan said the so-called "Trojan app" is one of the most invasive they have ever uncovered. He also warned that there is an increasing trend targeting smartphones using Google's Android software, which allows developers to submit apps with little vetting.
Google had not returned requests for comment at the time of publication.
Venkateskan wrote on the researcher's official blog: "In one of our earlier blogs, we have demonstrated how a Trojan logs all the details of incoming/outgoing calls and call duration in a text file.
"This Trojan is more advanced as it records the conversation itself in 'amr' format [which is optimised for recording speech]. Also it has many other malicious activities that we have seen in many of the earlier malware incidents targeted for Android platform."
MORE HERE: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/aug/02/mobile-app-google-android-security
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