RedDawn Android Malware Is Harvesting Personal Data of North Korean Defectors (theinquirer.net) 21
According to security company McAfee, North Korea uploaded three spying apps to the Google Play Store in January that contained hidden functions designed to steal personal photos, contact lists, text messages, and device information from the phones they were installed on. "Two of the apps purported to be security utilities, while a third provided information about food ingredients," reports The Inquirer. All three of the apps were part of a campaign dubbed "RedDawn" and targeted primarily North Korean defectors. From the report: The apps were promoted to particular targets via Facebook, McAfee claims. However, it adds that the malware was not the work of the well-known Lazarus Group, but another North Korean hacking outfit that has been dubbed Sun Team. The apps were called Food Ingredients Info, Fast AppLock and AppLockFree. "Food Ingredients Info and Fast AppLock secretly steal device information and receive commands and additional executable (.dex) files from a cloud control server. We believe that these apps are multi-staged, with several components."
"AppLockFree is part of the reconnaissance stage, we believe, setting the foundation for the next stage unlike the other two apps. The malwares were spread to friends, asking them to install the apps and offer feedback via a Facebook account with a fake profile promoted Food Ingredients Info," according to McAfee security researcher Jaewon Min. "After infecting a device, the malware uses Dropbox and Yandex to upload data and issue commands, including additional plug-in dex files; this is a similar tactic to earlier Sun Team attacks. From these cloud storage sites, we found information logs from the same test Android devices that Sun Team used for the malware campaign we reported in January. The logs had a similar format and used the same abbreviations for fields as in other Sun Team logs. Furthermore, the email addresses of the new malware's developer are identical to the earlier email addresses associated with the Sun Team."
"AppLockFree is part of the reconnaissance stage, we believe, setting the foundation for the next stage unlike the other two apps. The malwares were spread to friends, asking them to install the apps and offer feedback via a Facebook account with a fake profile promoted Food Ingredients Info," according to McAfee security researcher Jaewon Min. "After infecting a device, the malware uses Dropbox and Yandex to upload data and issue commands, including additional plug-in dex files; this is a similar tactic to earlier Sun Team attacks. From these cloud storage sites, we found information logs from the same test Android devices that Sun Team used for the malware campaign we reported in January. The logs had a similar format and used the same abbreviations for fields as in other Sun Team logs. Furthermore, the email addresses of the new malware's developer are identical to the earlier email addresses associated with the Sun Team."
How is this possible? (Score:1)
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Because there's no such thing as A.I., like you're thinking of it. Not in real life, anyway. There's some theoretical stuff that could work one day, but what companies like Amazon and Google are marketing as "A.I." right now aren't fundamentally more intelligent than a 1980's era chess machine. All that has changed since then is how big of a state tree computers can hold at once, and how fast they can traverse it.
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Say what? I heard AI was real.
You were probably at a VC funding event of some sort.
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What you're hearing is wishful thinking from people who have just started to notice we have really fast computers now. Computers that are fast enough that they can meaningfully crunch ridiculous amounts of data like that within a short enough time frame to be useful. Then of course a bunch of advertisers figured out how to do evil with it. But it's not magic, it's just basically statistics on steroids, mixed with some evolutionary learning algorithms.
No that's not true. (Score:2)
Well considering that random forest wasn't even invented until 1995. You're wrong.
That aside deep neural networks have moved from academia and into commercial production use where they're discovering new applications all the time and they're not even distantly related to game-trees.
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Consumers are the product and their data is the profit.
Never give in, e'en in the face of apocalypse... (Score:2)
It's just fucking metadata! Who cares if North Korea knows who is in the defectors' contact netsworks as long as they don't know the content of the calls!!!
Fuck the US for ever and ever, trading a prosaic crime conviction notch on the belt of an investigator for hundreds of millions continuing to live with a boot on their face, forever.
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Are you, dear reader, a US CIA or other agent, reading the sense of The People for your job? You are the problem, arguing for metadata when King George 250 years ago would have used metadata to round up all the Founding Fathers.
Congratulations, you Tool of Tyranny.
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Step by step cooking and lifestyle apps that presented Korean food, way of life, language use. In an easy to follow way would be a way to for a defector to study and discover in their own time.
The words used would be telling for any Korean app search terms. Vocabulary, jargon, slang, international words, fashion, brands would allow per app per user filtering.
The Korean terms to cook French food
The Ad (Score:2)
"Hey, are you a North Korean defector? Download this hip new app!"