According to Trend Micro's Karla Agregado, the recent rise of mobile computing has further signalled the need for users to have a good reliable mobile browsers, such as Opera Mini, installed into their smartphones or any mobile device.
And it's against this backdrop that he says that Trend believes that is for this reason that cybercriminals are currently using Opera Mobile as a disguise for mobile malware.
Agregado says that his research team recently encountered a website that seems to have been designed to be viewed on a mobile device. The site - which is in Russian - appears to look like the Opera site and informs visitors that they need to upgrade their version of Opera Mini.
“All of the links in [the] website lead to the download of the malicious file OperaMini.jar, which is detected as J2ME_FAKEBROWS.A”, he says in his latest security posting.
When executed into the device, the code checks if the mobile phone uses certain service centers and then proceeds to sending text messages to premium numbers.
Trend's research notes that the malware affects mobile devices that support MIDlets – a Java program for embedded devices, specifically the Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME).
The bottom line to this research, Infosecurity notes, is that Agregado recommends that users should check the Opera’s official website - http://opera.com or http://operamini.com - if they want to install Opera Mini on their device.