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Silent, Easily Made Android Rootkit Released At DefCon

Posted by Soulskill on from the it-slices-it-dices dept.

An anonymous reader writes with news that security experts from Spider Labs released a kernel level rootkit for Android devices at DefCon on Friday. "As a proof of concept, it is able to send an attacker a reverse TCP over 3G/WIFI shell upon receiving an incoming call from a 'trigger number.' This ultimately results in full root access on the Android device." The rootkit was developed over a period of two weeks, and has been handed out to DefCon attendees on DVD.

1 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What it doesn't say by AnEducatedNegro · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Ok as an android developer, you can't break out of the VM. period. that's the whole point of it. this exploit they are talking about is a kernel driver which you would include in a custom rom that you download from, say, sdx-developers (shoutout!). Now once you have a kernel rootkit, well you know the hell that can cause. But let's face it folks, mobile computing is here to stay. This is no different than having a rootkit on your windows box and tethering it through your phone. All the phone company sees are packets. It's also time to realize that our phones are full fledged computers. You gotta protect them.