Targeted Attack Campaign Uses Android Malware 74
Trailrunner7 writes "Android attacks have become all the rage in the last year or two, and targeted attacks against political activists in Tibet, Iran and other countries have been bubbling up to the surface more and more often. Now, those two trends have converged with the discovery of a targeted attack campaign that's going after Tibetan and Uyghur activists with a spear-phishing message containing a malicious APK file. Researchers say the attack appears to be coming from Chinese sources. The new campaign began a few days ago when unknown attackers were able to compromise the email account of a well-known Tibetan activist. The attackers then used that account to begin sending a series of spear-phishing messages to other activists in the victim's contact list. One of the messages referred to a human rights conference in Geneva in March, using the recipients' legitimate interest in the conference as bait to get them to open the attachment. The malicious attachment in the emails is named 'WUC's Conference.apk.'"
Harvests info (Score:4, Insightful)
The Android App harvests information (contacts, SMS messages, location, SIM data) and reports it back only when ordered to by the reception of a SMS message command. The location is particularly troubling because they can just keep pinging the phone to track the individual in real-time, then who knows what could happen next.
Re:Lol (Score:1, Insightful)
Cue the Fandroid apologists.
Phandroid checking in.
Shit can't be fixed if the vendor is shit. Get a Nexus device and always have a secure fucking awesome device.
Superior Unix Architecture? (Score:2, Insightful)
Whatever happened to the folks who claimed in +5 insightful posts that Linux has better security because of the superior Unix architecture? And that Windows malware, spyware, viruses and etc. were because of the crappy Windows code and not just because of popularity?
As Macs grow more popular, so does the malware targeting it. And Android has a huge malware problem. Perhaps those posts were wrong?
Re:Lol (Score:5, Insightful)
No apologies here. If someone is stupid enough to install a program they receive in email and they weren't expecting one? C'mon!
I'd still rather be able to choose what I want to install than to have the maker and/or seller of the device make those decisions for me.
Re:Superior Unix Architecture? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Harvests info (Score:4, Insightful)
Or are you pushing a straw man argument here, that I was suggesting the US government didn't do anything like that?
Honestly, fuck off. Bad government is bad government, no matter if my government is the same or worse.
Re:Lol (Score:5, Insightful)
It's called spear phishing. Where instead of blasting a million messages to everyone at random, you send a very plausible message to someone who ought to know the sender.
Basically, what happened here is someone hacked an activiist's email account, and used it to send a plausible looking message to their contacts, like say, something about an upcoming human rights conference. The recipient sees it's from someone they trust and the message is appropriate to their relationship (i.e., it came from a human rights activist and is about a human rights conference).
Yes, you probably should not be clicking links from anyone, even those of your trusted friends and relatives, but for most people, they believe it's authentic. Hell, the RSA hack happened the same way - a faked email coming from the hiriing company RSA uses went to the HR coordinator claiming to be a list of new hires.