Rapture Revisited: Android Trojan Invokes Bible, Stephen Colbert

25 May 2011 | 11:17 AM ET | Matt Liebowitz, SecurityNewsDaily Staff Writer

The predicted end of the world has come and gone, but a devious Trojan located in a controversial Android App is worming its way into users phones, making sure they don't forget the rapture.

The free app, called "The Holy F***ing Bible," purports to make the Bible "even more f***ing awesome than before" with celebrated classics such as Psalm 23, John 3:16, and, of course, "The Lord's F***ing Prayer."

But stored within this bawdy Bible app is a Trojan that, once installed via a corrupted version of the app, passes your smartphone device number to a host service that then spams you with text messages and download links every 33 minutes, researchers at the security firm Symantec reported.

[Not every version of "The Holy F***ing Bible" app is malicious.]

From here, things start to get strange, as the Trojan keeps the Bible and rapture themes alive.

The corrupted "Holy F***ing Bible" app runs a service called "theword" on infected phones, which spams out messages including, "Cannot talk right now, the world is about to end," and "Jebus is way over due for a comeback," to your entire contacts list. It also replaces your background image with a picture of mock pundit Stephen Colbert.

Colbert's mug and these texts, however, only showed up on phones pre-rapture (May 21). When it turned out the world wasn't going to end last Saturday, the Android Trojan changed its M.O. and triggered infected Android phones to replace Colbert's pic with one of "The Hebrew Hammer," the crime-fighting character played by actor Adam Goldberg in the 2003 comedy of the same name.

Accompanying the pic, infected phones also received a message reading, "Looks like Jebus was a no show, maybe Judaism was on to something."

To avoid falling victim to this ridiculous and ultimately harmful rogue Android app, Symantec recommends only downloading apps from the legitimate Android market and configuring your phone to stop the installation of nonmarket apps. It's also important to check the access permissions requested by every app you download, as well as the user comments to see if others have reported the app to be fraudulent.

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