After a public outcry and a write-in campaign failed to convince the creators of ‘Dog Wars’ to discontinue work on their app, it appears that protester(s) have now taken to targeting the users of the app directly in order to get their message across. Symantec has discovered that a Trojan code was planted into an older version of ‘Dog Wars’ (Beta 0.981) that can still be found circulating on warez sites. This version has not been found on the official Android Market.

Agreement by the user to grant the permissions requested by the app (which will include SMS permission) will allow for the the app to be installed. Upon installation, the display icon of the legitimate app looks almost identical to that of the app that has been bundled with the Trojan (on devices with a screen size of 3 – 3.5 inches). In fact, they looked so similar, we almost failed to spot this...

We have been taking a close look at Android threats since they first appeared, looking for ways to analyze and classify them, as well as looking at possible attack vectors they may use in the near future. Some of our research has uncovered how Android applications could potentially exploit other installed applications to steal their private information or execute malicious code. In particular, we came across something that resembles Windows DLL Hijacking. Bear in mind that we are not talking about Android vulnerabilities per se, but application-specific issues. We found a few applications in the Google Android Marketplace that were susceptible to this attack and have notified the application developers accordingly.

Android provides APIs that allow an application to dynamically load code to be executed. For example, an application may support plug-ins that are downloaded and then loaded at a later time. Unfortunately...