Smartphone Virus relies on Suspecting Spouses to proliferate

Once again it has been proved that in most cases hackers take advantage of human vulnerabilities to achive in their malicious objectives.

Take this mobile phone virus for instance. The virus, Named 'X Undercover', has infected 150,000 people in China allowing hackers to remotely monitor calls, leverages the general suspiscion spouses harbour for each other, parents harbour for their children and employer for their employees. The software, which contains the virus, is marketed towards discovering a spouse's betrayal, a cheating employee or simply to monitor a child.

Once a smart phone user is overpowered by his/her human weakness and goes for the software, the virus compromises the smartphone in the following ways:

1) The virus takes advantage of existing vulnerabilities in smart phones by forcing the three-way calling service to secretly open.

2) Allows conversations and text messages to be monitored and copied after the virus breaks into the calling sequence

3) It also secretly video the phone's owner, retrieve call and text records as well as pinpoint the user's latest GPS position.

Web security experts in China advise people to be cautious when clicking attachments in multimedia messages or allowing others to use their phone. Mobile users in other countries should exercise caution as well. --------

No comments