Cell Phone Spy Actually Trojan

A $50 program that installs secretly on cell phones to monitor calls and text messages of wayward spouses was dubbed a Trojan horse spy by a security company Wednesday.

FlexiSpy, said its distributor, Thailand-based Vervata, is "a remote activity logger for mobile phones…[that] will sliently [sic] retrive [sic] and report all phone activity to an email address that you specify."

It markets the $50 program as a way to snoop on spouses' and kids' phone conversations and text messaging. FlexiSpy captures data, then transmits it to Vervata's servers, from where users can retrieve call logs and full text of all SMS messages.

Finnish security firm F-Secure calls it a Trojan.

"This application installs itself without any kind of indication as to what it is. And when it is installed on the phone it completely hides itself from the user," wrote F-Secure researcher Jarno Niemela on the company's blog.