Your Spying iPhone

Careful, iPhone users: Your smart phone may be smarter than you think.

On Thursday researchers at Finnish cybersecurity firm F-Secure said they have spotted the first known instance of iPhone "spyware" called Mobile Spy, a piece of commercial software that sells for $99 a year.

Mobile Spy developer Retina-X Studios says the software can invisibly track the call logs, text messages and even the GPS data of any iPhone it's installed on, allowing the eavesdropper to track the user's whereabouts on a Web site that hosts the stolen data.

"Mobile Spy will reveal the truth for any company or family," the company's site advertises. "You will finally learn the truth about [your family members' or employees'] call, mobile-Web and text-message activities by logging into your Mobile Spy account from any computer. The world's first iPhone spy software!"

Smart phone spyware for other platforms isn't new: Commercially available spyware for Windows Mobile and Symbian operating systems have existed for years. But Mobile Spy's software is the first spyware vendor to target Apple's (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) growing marketshare in the telecom world.

While Mobile Spy currently targets only iPhone 3G users, another vendor known as Flexispy advertises a similar program that is compatible with both iPhone versions launching Dec. 21. Both programs require the user to "jailbreak" their targets' iPhone, a simple software hack that allows applications not approved by Apple to be installed.

Since before the iPhone's 2007 launch, cybersecurity researchers have been warning about the potential for malicious software that could secretly install itself to steal passwords or use the iPhone to send spam--just as cybercriminals have long been hijacking PCs (see "Hacking the iPhone"). While hackers have demonstrated those kinds of exploits in theory, "in the wild" threats have yet to appear. And cybercriminals aren't likely to use commercially available software like Mobile Spy and Flexispy to infect victims via the Internet.