Trojan:Android/SmSilence monitors incoming SMS messages on the device and forwards the collected data to a remote location.
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SmSilence.A is an SMS spying trojan that was discovered in a third-party Android app market in South Korea. It infiltrates a device by pretending to be an app associated with the products served by a famous coffeehouse chain, Starbucks. This is merely a disguise as it is not actually endorsed by nor affiliated with Starbucks.
Once installed, SmSilence.A uses an image file named ‘Starbugs.png’ for its icon, featuring the well-recognized Starbucks logo. When the user clicks on this icon to launch the app, an error notification message will pop up. At the same time, in the background, SmSilence.A is quietly creating a new service to enable its SMS monitoring activities. This service is set up to use the maximum priority value (1000) so that it will be the first one to see any incoming messages.
After creating the service, SmSilence.A will notify about the infection on the device to a URL, http://[...].com/Android_SMS/[...]/installing.php. It uses the HTTP POST method to send the following message"mobile=[number]" where [number] respectively indicates the phone number registered to the device.
SmSilence.A is only interested in SMS messages that originated from numbers beginning with '+82' which is the country code for South Korea.
It then proceeds to collect the messages’ content and the senders’ phone numbers, and forwards the gathered information to a remote location, http://[...].com/ Android_SMS/[...]/receiving.php. Any notification of these messages will be blocked, leaving the users unaware that they are receiving messages in the inbox.
This malware is discussed in the following Labs Weblog post: