Valentine's Day is hit with MMS malware

RUSSIAN VALENTINE'S DAY LOVERS have been targeted by an MMS malware that activates a SMS Trojan instead.

Malware criminals have jumped on the Valentine's Day bandwagon in the hope of hooking suckers in love who just want to express their affections through MMS messaging. But lovers in Russia opting to download some MMS apps will find themselves paying huge phone bills after being directed to premium rate SMS short code numbers.

The Vole warned of the scam on its blog and found a dodgy downloadable file called 'love_mms.rar'. This contains a 'jimm2010.jar' installer that Microsoft realised was in fact a Trojan.

The company reckons it was developed to target punters on Russian telco networks and the Valentine's Day incentive is predictably nausea inducing. The pictures of anthropomorphic cuddly bears and hedgehogs with arms open for hugs and carry hearts is enough to make a grown man puke.

There's even a cute dog with a rose forced into its mouth but no cat action, which makes a change. We can't help feeling they deserve everything they get.

Any muppetskis stupid enough to download the Valentine's malware files will be re-directed to the premium rate short code number without even knowing about it, until the bill comes in, of course.

Microsoft points out that the people who wrote the JAR installer made sure it was executable on pretty much every mobile environment that supports Java. That means it will work on Symbian, Windows CE OSs and others. µ