Android malware steals info from one million phone owners

Updated A developer of Android apps has been accused of using their apps to steal information from more than one million smartphone users.

John Hering and Kevin MaHaffey, of mobile security firm Lookout, told the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas that they discovered that a wallpaper app developed by Jackeey Wallpaper (who have created over 70 different applications for the Google Android mobile operating system) secretly transmitted affected phones’ numbers, subscriber identifiers, and voicemail numbers to a server in Shenzen, China.

Over a million people are believed to have downloaded the app – which Sophos has not yet seen – from the Android Market (Google’s equivalent to the Apple iPhone AppStore).

This…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.

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