New Android Trojan horse could prove costly

Graham cluley
Graham Cluley
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@gcluley

Some vendors are calling it HongTouTou, others have named it Adrd, and Sophos (rather unimaginatively in my view!) treats it as a variant of Geinimi, but whatever your anti-virus product chooses to call it, there’s no denying that a new Trojan horse for Android smartphones is making headlines.

The latest Trojan horse for Google’s Android operating system has been seen posing in Chinese third-party app stores as legitimate programs such as Wallpaper apps.

The official Android Market, run by Google, does not appear to be carrying the malicious apps – but if you go “off-road” and choose to install software on your smartphone from elsewhere on the net, then you could be putting your device at risk.

For this reason, the vast majority of Android users probably have little to fear. But those who do install applications from unknown sources (known as “sideloading”) do need to…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus 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 security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.

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