Symantec's AntiVirus research centre discovers Trojan Horse for Palm Pilots

Symantec Corp. today announced it Antivirus Research Centre (SARC) found the first Trojan Horse (a malicious programme that purports to do one thing but in fact does another) for Palm Pilots.

The Trojan Horse was packaged as a crack for people who want to pirate the GameBoy emulator, Liberty, a legitimate programme for the Palm. However, the crack is actually a malicious programme that deletes applications and databases from a user's Palm Pilot.

It is called Palm.Liberty.A and will affect any Palm device on which it is installed. Data can be resynchronised with the users PC but some data may be lost. Norton AntiVirus can detect this programme on the Desktop PC before the malicious application is synchronised to the Palm Pilot.

Eric Chien, head of Symantec's Antivirus Research Centre, commented: "Whilst no users have reported being infected, this signifies the latest development for devices outside of the PC being under attack. The Palm platforms and all PDA devices have long been criticised for their lack of security as they are running on processors that do not support security features.

Fortunately, the backup/synchronisation features of PDA's with PCs means that often any information lost can be saved, but as PDA's become more and more 'connected' this problem of security will only intensify."

This trojan originated in Sweden, and was written by Aaron Ardiri, a lecturer at the University of Gavle. Ardiri is the co-author of Liberty, the legitimate GameBoy emulator for the Palm Computing Platform.