Android users are being warned today as spamming virus software has been found in some of the free games. What happens is that when the software is downloading, it contacts a web server for a list of random phone numbers and from that, it will start sending spam to all of those numbers.The problem with this is that it has affected some of the most popular games, such as Need for Speed Most Wanted and Angry Birds, which in turn will spread the virus very quickly due to the games high popularity, possibly causing lots of problems in the long run for lots of people.
"This sort of attack changes the economics of SMS spam, as the spammer no longer has to pay for the messages that are sent," said analyst Andrew Conway at Cloudmark. " Now that we know it can be done, we can expect to see more more complex attacks that are harder to take down."
Unlimited Texts are Needed
Security organisations believe that it has not affected many phones at this moment in time, however phone companies have noticed that these spam texts have been passing through most of their systems daily, adding up to approximately 500,000 texts a day going through their services. The main way this works is that advertisements pop up offering free apps, then some users will be drawn into this and they then download the app. After that the app then dissapears from there view (Homescreen) and starts sending the messages. After that the user may be inclined to download it again, therefore encouraging more messages to send through the servers.
Advisory
My recommendation is that I would advise you not to download any apps until the problem has been rectified, or if you wish to download apps, avoid downloading them through free app advertisements to reduce the possibility of this virus happening to you.
0 comments:
Post a Comment