Mobile Privacy and Security: Symantec Spots Android Trojan

Sometimes the walled garden isn’t such a bad idea. It can take forever for an App to get through the Apple red-tape, but you can feel comfortable knowing that there’s more than a good chance the app is nice and squeaky clean. You might want to be a bit more wary downloading apps on Google Android, however. A prime example: Symantec has identified a trojan in the game “Tapsnake” (which runs on Android). Here are the potential implications.

Tip of the hat to Symantec for catching this interesting find. It works like this…

You download Tapsnake, and you also have to pay and download GPS Spy on the Android platform. If you have both, and access to two different phones, GPS Spy can listen in on the location of the Android phone that has Tapsnake installed. The ‘cute’ part is that the developer explains that the trojan is there for a reason…

Obviously, the usage is up to you — nefarious or not. Maybe you’re  looking after your kid? There’s some legal issues with this, like undisclosed surveillance, but Symantec doesn’t touch on that. Getting rid of the trojan is not as easy as quitting the game because Tapsnake only has to be run once. After that, the process runs in the background for the duration the phone is in use.  However, getting the whole trick to work as advertised requires work, as Symantec details…

Bottom line? A walled garden into an App store has it’s pros and cons, but so does letting everything roam free.

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