Insecurity experts are going to demonstrate a "rootkit" program they've written for Google's Android phone next month at the Defcon hacking conference in Las Vegas.

Christian Papathanasiou, a security consultant with Chicago's Trustwave said that once it's installed on the Android phone, the rootkit can be activated via a phone call or SMS. It gives attackers a stealthy and hard-to-detect tool for siphoning data from the phone or misdirecting the user.

Papathanasiou said the hard part of writing an Android rootkit is figuring out how to take advantage of new mobile features while making sure the software runs smoothly on the new platform. In this case the rootkit runs as a module in Android's Linux kernel, it has the highest level of access to the Android phone and can be a very powerful tool for attackers.