The Glade 4.0

The recent explosion in popularity of applications for smartphones running Google's Android system has lead to an almost inevitable development: a trojan virus targeted specifically at Android phones. On 10th August, anti-virus specialists Kaspersky announced that a new virus - Trojan-SMS.AndroidOS.FakePlaye r.a - was infecting mobile phones in order to send SMS messages to premium rate numbers.

Premium rate diallers are a nasty scam long familiar to PC owners, particularly during the dial-up era. Once a trojan is in your system, it makes calls, and now sends text messages, to a premium rate number operated by the criminals who wrote the virus. The best part for the virus authors is that they don't have to rob you of any money directly - the telecoms companies collect your cash on behalf of the criminals.

In its latest incarnation, the Android trojan is spread via SMS. Users receive a text message advising them to download a free 13KB media player application - which in reality is the trojan. The scam originated in Russia, and you will only lose money if you have a Russian phone, but any Android phone can easily become infected.

This latest news is an embarrassment for Google, who designed the Android system with security at the forefront of their minds. There were a couple of isolated bits of spyware found on a few Android phones in 2009, but this is a sophisticated attack on Google's customers.

It was only a matter of time, of course, before virus authors turned their attentions to the Android platform, which has become much more popular in recent months, but this embarrassment is another setback in Google's desperate attempt to claw some market share away from the ubiquitous iPhone. On a wider scale, this could be a blow to consumer confidence in the burgeoning market in third party apps that has developed across all the various mobile platforms. People have been happily installing software applications on their mobile phone for a couple of years now without really thinking about the security angle. Now this attack has occurred, others will inevitably follow, and consumers might start to think twice before downloading the latest app.

It's not as though trojan viruses are actually new to mobile phones, of course. The Symbian system that runs on so many Sony Ericcson and Nokia phones has been subject to premium-rate SMS trojans for years - but as Apple and Google are starting to look as though they are set to become the big players in mobile phone technology for at least the next decade, this is an unfortunately-timed piece of news.

A cynical person might suggest that the real outcome of what is really a very small-scale incident is that anti-malware software companies will now capitalise on the publicity in order to force anti-virus products on to mobile phone users as well as computer users, and indeed Kaspersky are talking about releasing such a system in 2011.