Android Hackers Honing Skills In Russia

MikeatWired writes "The malware business growing around Google Android — now the leading smartphone operating system — is still in its infancy. Today, many of the apps built to steal money from Android users originate from Russia and China, so criminal gangs there have become cyber-trailblazers. Sophos and Symantec on Wednesday released their latest Android malware discoveries written in Russian. While the language narrows the number of potential victims, the social-engineering tactics used to get Android users to install the malware is universal. The gang tracked by Sophos is using fake antivirus scanners, while Symantec is tracking cybercriminals using mobile websites to offer bogus versions of popular games. Sophos says the criminals are like other entrepreneurs launching startups. They're starting in Russia, but have far greater ambitions. 'I don't think we can say that they're necessarily using it as a testing ground — think of it more as a local business that as it grows may gain multinational ambitions,' Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said in an email interview on Wednesday. The cyber scam tracked by Sophos was reported this week by GFI Lab, which discovered links to the bogus antivirus software on Twitter. Sophos dug deeper and found that the .ru domains pointed to the same Internet protocol address hosted in Ukraine."

Re:Android is virus laden

[Ukab the Great]

I agree. Human behavior is a valid engineering problem, and reducing certain functionality to get around it for certain situations is a valid engineering tradeoff. A problem is a problem, keyboard and chair are irrelevant. Apple would rather deal with angry geeks who scream about freedom and openness and who like most geeks have no functional concept of engineering tradeoffs than have dimitri and olga kill somebody because they intentionally (or even worse, accidentally) disabled 911 access when they tried to pwn someone's Android device through the pirated copy of Hot Nude Bolshevik Solitaire the user downloaded from Leonid's Spice Dicey Back Alley Appstore.