According to latest research by Kaspersky Lab, it has been revealed that for the first time in the history of mobile cybercrime, an Obad.a Trojan, a malicious app for Android, is being spread using botnets controlled by other criminal groups. It also became clear that Obad.a is mostly found in the CIS countries. In total, 83% of attempted infections were recorded in Russia, while it was also detected on mobile devices in Ukraine, Belarus, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.
Apart from using mobile botnets, this Trojan is also distributed by spam messages. This is a major carrier of the Obad.a Trojan. Typically a message warning the user of unpaid “debts” lures victims to follow a link which automatically downloads Obad.a onto the mobile device. Again, though, users must run the downloaded file in order to install the Trojan.
In three months, we discovered 12 versions of Backdoor.AndroidOS.Obad.a. As soon as we discovered this, we informed Google and the loophole has been closed in Android 4.3.
However, only a few new smartphones and tablets run this version, and older devices running earlier versions are still under threat. Obad.a, which uses a large number of unpublished vulnerabilities, is more like Windows malware than other Trojans for Android, said Roman Unuchek, Antivirus Expert, Kaspersky Lab.
When legitimate sites are cracked and users are redirected to dangerous ones, Obad.a exclusively targets mobile users if potential victims enter the site from a home computer nothing happens, but smartphones and tablets of any operation system could be redirected to those fake sites (although only Android users are at risk).
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