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Android Ransomware Threatens To Share Your Browsing History With Your Friends (symantec.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The newly discovered Lockdroid ransomware is unique in two ways. First it uses perfectly overlaid popups to trick users into giving it admin privileges. This trick works on devices running Android versions prior to 5.0 (Lollipop), which means 67% of all Android smartphones. Secondly, after it encrypts files and asks for a ransom, it also steals the user's browsing history and contacts list, and blackmails the user to pay the ransom, or his browsing history will be forwarded to his contacts.
Bring it back.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Anything to force vendors to, you know, provide up-to-date software. Unfortunately, this probably won't have much of an effect...
>> Friends vs contacts? Why put up such a stupidly worded title?
The article assumes that you are acting as a consumer on a personal PC, that many of your contacts are friends (as opposed to work colleagues), and that your personal browser history contains a lot of naughty stuff. Unfortunately, it also assumes that any of your contacts would do more than delete a lengthy message like this on sight; you probably don't have hundreds of "friends" who care THAT much about you. (e.g., Even if Hillary Clinton herself emailed me a list of her classified emails, my short attention span would still compel me to delete the message before reading it and go on to something shorter and more interesting in my inbox.)
I don't have any friends and my contact list is empty.
"Once the malicious app (a fake porn-viewing app in this case) is installed and run by the user"- exactly. Also, the user would have had to enabled side loading ignoring all of the various warnings.
You still have to accept and side-load an application off of a sketchy site. Will people ever learn?
Kudos to the app author, though. The technique is pretty interesting.
Of course, users can't grant root access to anything, on a stock phone regardless of version. Only rooted phones would be potentially vulnerable, and all others wouldn't show an admin-access dialog at all.
This is on top of requiring the user to actually want to sideload an app called Porn'o'Rama in the first place, if that's what it was really called.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
If you stick with Google Play, you're safe from this.
It is only a problem if you side load apps from untrusted sources.
Dear friends and family... I look at porn. So do you. Deal with it.
Blackmail me now, suckah!
Stupid people make stupid choices and get pwned. Details at 11.
Those animals!
Says the Apple fan-boy acting like Apple has never had a single exploit.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I wonder if there is a Pavlov effect tied to it by now --- do many people nowadays get aroused at the mere sight of the Chrome Incognito Mode starting window?
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
If malware forwards me my friend's browsing history, I would totally believe he went to all those sites, because there's no way a malware could possibly lie, or that a compromised machine could have been used as a proxy for some other agent. /s.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I don't have any friends.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
My boss once got a virus that emailed porn links to ask his contacts. When he realised what had happened he sent out an aplology, but said he was surprised at how many responseshe got before that said "thanks", " that's s good one", or returned the favour by sending porn links of their own.
It is a shame that these are the only two serious options in terms of smartphones.
Given how cheap you can get smartphones from China these days, get one of those, and try stuff out on that, rather than your main phone.
John_Chalisque
It really, really matters with search history.
Example: Lot of people probably searched for 'ashley madison' when it was in the news. Now, to a spouse without the context of the time that would look really bad. And that's a tame example. Imagine the search queries you may use to look up a recent horrific crime in the news, you would probably use just keywords and the locale. Without context it would make you look pretty bad.
Entirely unrelatedly, the Kinkymidget Ball Stompers would make a great punk band name.
Oh, I'm sure all the people that know me would be absolutely terrified when they saw that.....I've spent most of my day surfing Hackaday, esp8266.com, Github, Orange Pi - forums and loading all sorts of specsheets. At least when they saw that I've been browsing Slashdot several times a day they'd permanently block me!
Oh Ghod, this is terribly! Just imagine what would happen to my nerd-creds if it was widely known that I don't watch any porn to speak of, that I sometimes approve of government control, when I feel it makes sense, and I'm not all that keen on having the latest, bleeding edge gadgets?
By that, I mean, what's the difference between asking for money in order to not send your actual browsing history to your friends, or asking for money in order to not send a made up (and far more incriminating) browsing history to friends?
Seems like the writers could have skipped that step and still done just fine.
All I get in Firefox is a black screen with light gray text saying "Symantec Connect Loading Your Community Experience". Checking the error console reveals a JavaScript error that "occurs when $compile attempts to fetch a template from some URL, and the request fails." If Symantec's web site is fragile enough to completely break when a JavaScript file fails to load, why should I trust Symantec with anything?
What is to stop an application from opening a socket to a trojan server, downloading a binary, writing it, chmod 700, then executing it?
Google might not recognize that malware for what it is until far, far too late.
And since the majority of Android devices are vulnerable to towelroot, that binary owns the phone.
A mass install of a popular app with such stealth malware could see thousands upon thousands of phones suddenly compromised, and there is nothing that Google can do.
Flogging | tar & feathers
What? Are you admitting to your choice of porn up front?
Now, I see ransomware is the answer. Politicians wouldn't want their porn history exposed.
(||) Nehmo (||)
I've been using and working with computers since before you were born
Unlikely at best and laughable at worst. I have been programming longer than most people whose names aren't Kernighan or Ritchie.
and have never had a single one get infected with a virus or malware of any kind.
The plural of anecdote is not data. Your one experience means less than nothing. The simple fact is that people continue to be infected by malware of all types on all platforms. This is not a debatable point.
It boggles the mind how anyone could have that happen unless they went out of their way to make it happen and/or they are a complete moron.
Right. Now you're just being stupid.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.