Phones with the Android operating system have a new serious warning regarding a major danger they are exposed to due to a new type of malware called Joker. According to a company specialized in cyber security, the new malware called Joker has already been downloaded over 500.000 times by various Android phone users, and the number is increasing, so we are talking about a problem that is getting bigger.
No less than 24 applications for the Android operating system are affected by the existence of this new malware, and again we are talking about Google's inability to detect the problem. Just like a regular malware, it downloads files to Android phones, steals SMS, contacts, and a lot of other information, displaying ads in the background from which hackers make quite serious amounts of money.
WARNING for Android, New BIG DANGER for Phones
Phones with the Android operating system are infected at the moment of downloading and installing the application from the Google Play Store, a store where, in theory, infected applications should not be published. The interesting part is that this malware was only intended for users from certain countries, and it is not activated if the infected application is not downloaded from a country that is of interest to the hacker who created the malware.
“If you download one of the compromised Android apps, then most of the time, a splash screen will be displayed while various initialization procedures take place in the background. These include downloading an AES-encrypted and ophthalmic configuration from the C&C payload distribution server. Joker "offers a second-stage component that silently simulates interaction with ad websites, steals the victim's SMS messages, contact list and device information."
Unfortunately, the countries in the European Union are among those that are of interest to hackers, so users from these can become very easy targets without knowing what is secretly happening on their Android phones. Unfortunately for all Android phone users, Google fails to provide the necessary protection for the Google Play Store to be a safe application store, from which you can install applications without any worries.
Android has had this problem for a very long time, and it continues to have it because the freedom offered by Google gives rise to abuses of this kind, which cannot be stopped at all, apparently.
