This is a guest post by Amit Sharma who blogs atPCMastero. If you would like to do a guest post, check our Guest posting guidelines.
As we all know, The Android due to its openness is booming now a days but here’s some hackers came into play with their degraded minds and attacked on the Android Apps Market thus resulting in infecting thousands of Android phones with malware apps.
Recently such an attack took place which ultimately infect some of the Android apps in the Android Market and these apps were live in the Android Market for whole 4 days. Before the authorities came to know about this, the apps were downloaded by over 50,000 times.Can you imagine the popularity?
Now Google and Android are working and trying to fix the infected users.The Apps were essentially copies of other popular apps, modified slightly to contain a trojan horse.
Described as a “root exploit” the trojan is able to steal all the Android devices data and could repurpose the phone perform action ( for example, send sensitive data to hackers, can also sends sensitive information obtained from the device, including : IMEI, DeviceID, Line Number, Subscriber ID without the user`s knowledge).Such is the level of harm to the users!
As soon as Google heard about this scam, it took not more than five minutes to pull over all those infected apps from the Android Market. But it was too late for those 50,000 unfortunate users who became victim of this scam.
Now here lies the difference between the Apple Store and Android Market : Apple checks and approves every app that is posted on the App Store and sometimes rejects apps for confusing reasons, whereas Android Developers can, once they’ve registered with Google, publish apps whenever they want. Such an approach leaves many of the security concerns up to the user.
This is the full list of trojan-infected malware apps from Android publisher Myournet:
1. Falling Down
2. Super Guitar Solo
3. Super History Eraser
4. Photo Editor
5. Super Ringtone Maker
6. Super Sex Positions
7. Hot Sexy Videos
8. Chess
9. 下坠滚球_Falldown
10. Hilton Sex Sound
11. Screaming Sexy Japanese Girls
12. Falling Ball Dodge
13. Scientific Calculator
14. Dice Roller
15. 躲避弹球
16. Advanced Currency Converter
17. App Uninstaller
18. 几何战机_PewPew
19. Funny Paint
20. Spider Man
21. 蜘蛛侠
So better not to download and install the above listed apps.
Now regarding future, one should follow these guidelines to protect themselves from such scams :
1. One should only use regulated Android marketplaces for downloading and installing Android applications.
2.In the Android OS application settings there is an option to stop the installation of non-market applications, which can help to prevent against this type of attack.
3.Checking user comments on the marketplace can also aid in determining if the application is safe.
4.Lastly, always check the access permissions being requested during the installation of any Android applications.
If above conditions satisfies then one can safely download and install the Android Apps. After all safety comes first, then the other things.
