29 Aug 2000
Liberty Trojan horse low threat to Palm users
Sophos advises that a Trojan horse which deletes applications on
the Palm operating system poses little threat to computer
users.
The Palm/Liberty-A Trojan horse (also known as
PalmOS/LibertyCrack or Crack 1.1) appears to have been distributed
in the warez (pirated software) community as a crack for Liberty,
an application to emulate a Nintendo Gameboy on your Palm PDA
operating system.
Instead of illegally cracking the Liberty software (and allowing
users access to functionality normally only available upon
registration) the Trojan horse deletes all programs on your Palm
PDA.
The author of Liberty, a Swedish lecturer called Aaron Ardiri,
has admitted writing the Trojan horse and giving it to "a few
friends".
At the time of writing Sophos has received no reports of this
Trojan horse from customers, and do not believe it will become
widespread.
"It has always been possible to write malicious software for the
Palm operating system," said Graham Cluley, senior technology
consultant for Sophos Anti-Virus. "This Trojan horse is a very low
threat to Palm users who are sensible enough to avoid warez mailing
lists and do not download pirated software. This combined with the
Trojan horse's extremely obvious payload and lack of replication
code means it is unlikely to be encountered by the vast majority of
users."
Read more about
Palm/Liberty-A.
About Sophos
More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos as the best protection against complex threats and data loss. Sophos is committed to providing security and data protection solutions that are simple to manage, deploy and use and that deliver the industry's lowest total cost of ownership. Sophos offers award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, and network access control solutions backed by SophosLabs - a global network of threat intelligence centers. With more than two decades of experience, Sophos is regarded as a leader in security and data protection by top analyst firms and has received many industry awards.
Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.