And thus it begins, the era of SMS viruses for Android. That's according to security firm Kaspersky, which earlier this week warned that the first malicious program classified as a Trojan-SMS has been detected for smartphones built around Google's Android platform.

"The new malicious program penetrates smartphones running Android in the guise of a harmless media player application," Kaspersky warns. "Users are prompted to install a file of just over 13KB with the standard Android extension .APK. Once installed on the phone, the Trojan uses the system to begin sending SMSs to premium rate numbers without the owner's knowledge or consent, resulting in money passing from a user's account to that of the cybercriminals."

Called Trojan-SMS.AndroidOS.FakePlayer, Kaspersky says this bit of mischievous (and costly) code has already infected a number of mobile devices. That isn't surprising, considering that the Trojan-SMS category is the most widespread class of malware for mobile phones, Kaspersky claims.

More here.

The ZeuS banking trojan is back making headlines, this time for hitting up infected machines with fake enrollment screens for both Visa and MasterCard credit cards.

"When you log into your bank, it says you have to enroll in Verified by Visa, that it's regulated now and you have to do it," explains Mickey Boodaei, CEO at Trusteer, a security firm.

This new variant sits in waiting until the potential victim logs into a list of targeted sites. Once they do, the ZeuS trojan uses this and other shenanigans to trick users into forking over not just credit card credentials, but Social Security numbers, personal identification numbers, and other personal info.

The tech media has gone into full "told you so" mode after it was discovered that hackers managed to plant a Trojan in the popular Unreal IRC server, proving that Linux users need to worry about malware too.

"This is very embarrassing... We found that the Unreal3.2.8.1.tar.gz file on our mirrors has been replaced quite a while ago with a version with a backdoor (Trojan) in it,"  an announcement on the Unreal IRC forum states. "This backdoor allows a person to execute ANY command with the privileges of the user running the ircd. The backdoor can be executed regardless of any user restrictions (so even if you have passworded server or hub that doesn't allow any users in)."

While a single outbreak doesn't constitute an insecure OS platform by any stretch of the imagination, perhaps the media has a point. The announcement goes on to state that the "replacement of the.tar.gz occurred in November 2009 (at least on some mirrors," which means it took nearly a year for it to be noticed. What most of the write-ups are insinuating -- and we'll just come out and say it -- is that perhaps this was left unnoticed in the Linux community because of an arrogance that suggests the open source OS is impenetrable. Obviously that isn't the case, but despite reports you may read elsewhere, the opposite isn't true either -- Linux users needn't worry that the sky is falling because of one high profile outbreak.