Cyber attacks on smart phones a growing trend.

The cyberunderground took notice. Download the wrong wallpaper app for your Google Android phone and you could get one that will harvest the phone and voice-mail numbers and data that can be used to disclose your location. Mobile security firm Lookout discovered 80 such Android Web apps last week, which have since been taken down by Google, says John Hering, Lookout's CEO.

The information was being transmitted to a website based in China. The wallpapers, showing innocuous images of ponies, basketball scenes and such, were downloaded more than a million times.

In a more pernicious attack, a scammer has pioneered a way to trigger premium-rate phone calls from infected Windows smartphones. The attack, discovered by Mikko Hypponen, senior researcher at Finnish anti-virus firm F-Secure, begins by spreading infections via a popular 3D game delivered as a Web app.

The richest target remains consumer and commercial banking and other accounts that run on Windows XP computers, still the most widely used device to access the Internet. However, as much more secure Windows 7 PCs begin to replace older XP machines, cybercriminals inevitably will turn to smartphones and mobile devices such as the iPad. "It will happen sooner or later," Hypponen says.

Link:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/wireless/phones/2010-08-02-cybercrime-smartphones_N.htm