Banking trojan targets BlackBerry users

Criminals are targeting BlackBerry devices with four new variants of the dangerous ZitMo mobile banking trojan.

ZitMo (Zeus in the mobile) appeared two years ago and is designed to steal mobile transaction authentication numbers (mTANs), or one-time passwords.

mTANS were popular with European banks and were sent via SMS message to mobile users as an additional layer of security.

The malware has previously posed as a legitimate banking security application which, once installed, would intercept incoming SMS messages and forward them to a remote server.

The latest samples discovered by Kaspersky researchers were targeting users in Germany, Spain and Italy, said senior malware analyst Denis Maslennikov.

The BlackBerry samples masqueraded as .cod and .jar files, while a fifth trageted Android and hid as a security app, Maslennikov said.

BlackBerry devices were historically not targeted by hackers, while Android malware was commonplace.

This article originally appeared at scmagazineus.com