Researcher warns of Android phone 'botnet'Malware has been spreading on Android mobile phones that takes control of certain email accounts to create a "botnet" to send out spam, a security researcher says.
Microsoft security engineer Terry Zink says the malware has infected phones of users' Yahoo email accounts to send out spam messages.
"We've all heard the rumours, but this is the first time I have seen it - a spammer has control of a botnet that lives on Android devices," Zink said in a blog post on Tuesday.
Be aware as Thailand is on the list of countries where this viral spam bot net has been found.
We could all sit outside on banana lounges discussing the best way to rebuild a 4WD transmission and agree, through shared stories of conquests supporting our assertions, that there is no basis to the proposition that those least assured of their persuasions are the first to condemn others for theirs.
I've definitely been getting more spam emails from yahoo users recently .... maybe they're from this botnet. Worst thing iis people have no idea their device has become a remote controlled zombie and might carry on for months before realizing if ever.
I wonder when iOS will become host to attacks like these? It's definitely possible... I think...
I wish I could afford to make just a dollar a year.
Just Buy a Mac
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I used to think that installing only apps downloaded from the App Store almost guaranteed safety, until I got an infected file alert from Sophos while syncing the iPhone with the Mac. It was enough to make me install an antivirus app on iOS .... but I don't think the infected file (if it hadn't been intercepted) would have done anything as serious as creating a botnet.
Because of Apple's security checks (not infallible but very rigorous) and the more resilient nature of iOS compared to Android, I think that - on a non-jailbroken iOS - it's much less likely to happen on iOS. I'd never say it was impossible though.
Last edited by Tungsten; 8th July 2012 at 01:20.
I wasn't aware there were antivirus apps for iOS, (let alone Android)? In any case, I'd imagine the infected file would affect only PCs/Macs depending on what the virus was.
I got an SMS virus not too long ago. It had sent a couple hundred sms to people NOT in my address book -- quite an interesting thing to do. I only assume that it took my address book and used the next phone to send out sms using my address book -- that way it would be pretty difficult to warn people (because they're not in you address book). In any case, I contacted TRUE and they said that nothing was charged to my account... strange (perhaps it all went through iMessage?). Still, for safety and security, I wiped my phone and the previous backups (after backing up to the cloud using a jailbreak method) and have been running a clean OS since (or at least I hope so). No other incidents since then.
yes, a few and the best one I've found is VirusBarrier! iOS's security doesn't allow VirusBarrier to run in the background doing automatic scanning, but it does on-demand scanning. I use it mainly for scanning email attachments and Dropbox files. As you say, it's unlikely any file would infect iOS but I'd much prefer to detect any malware before it gets synced onto a Mac or (in the case of Dropbox) onto a PC. It doesn't just scan, but it will attempt to repair the file too. Also detects phishing websites, etc.Originally Posted by theanimaster
Was your phone jailbroken when it got the virus, or did you jailbreak it afterwards?
Whoa... now it's all fuzzy. I think I might have posted what happened here... I'll try digging up that post but I think it wasn't jailbroken when I got the virus. After wiping it clean and restoring from a backup however, I jailbroke it so that I can extract my app/game data and save that to DropBox. Then I deleted all my iPhone backups from the mac and wiped the iPhone AGAIN. I haven't restored any of the game data after that. It was really a 'just in case' move -- otherwise I've been absolutely clean since -- and all my saved games lost (unless they were games that support cloud-based saves... which was less than a handful). I still have my game data backed up on DropBox, however, that data may become incompatible with newer updates to the apps.
Right now I only have 4 games installed on my iPhone -- two Angry Bird variants, Tiny Wings, and BattleHeart.
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