Who Wrote the Pincer Android Trojan?

Who Wrote the Pincer Android Trojan? Stories in this blog’s Breadcrumbs series have sought to comb through clues that point to the possible location and identities of malware authors and purveyors.  But from time to time those clues lead definitively back to an individual. In today’s post, we’ll talk with the author of  the Pincer Trojan for Android — a 32-year-old programmer at a mobile app development firm in Russia.

In April, Finnish security firm F-Secure  first warned about Trojan:Android/Pincer.A, which comes disguised as a security certificate and is designed to surreptitiously intercept and forward text messages. As F-Secure notes, previous malicious mobile apps pretending to be certificates have been mobile components of banking Trojans aimed at defeating two-factor authentication.

F-Secure researchers observed that Pincer used the IMEI of the victim’s phone as an identifier, and that the Trojan would call home to a control server and report the device’s phone and serial numbers, phone model, carrier and OS version. They also found that Pincer checks to see if it’s being run in a virtual environment, which is a common trick designed to frustrate malware analysis tools used by security researchers.

Interestingly, F-Secure noted that the code within the trojan includes a class called “USSDDumbExtendedNetworkService” — a component that was assigned a seemingly arbitrary variable that F-Secure researchers said was probably either associated with a French Canadian concrete company or the Twitter handle of a young Russian whose Google+ page lists employment as “Android developer”.