For those of you that have a Iphone and insist on the need for Village wide Wi-FI, read this below. Although it specifically applies to Android phones, how far behind can the rest of you be?
Boy I sure would like a pole on the number of Wi-Fi interested owners/
Boy I sure would like a pole on the number of Wi-Fi interested owners/
Android Phones Hit by ‘Ransomware’
You are guilty of child porn, child abuse, zoophilia or sending out bulk spam. You are a criminal. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has locked you out of your phone and the only way to regain access to all your data is to pay a few hundred dollars.
That message — or variations of it — has popped up on hundreds of thousands of people’s Android devices in just the last month. The message claims to be from the F.B.I., or cybersecurity firms, but is in fact the work of Eastern European hackers who are hijacking Android devices with a particularly pernicious form of malware, dubbed “ransomware” because it holds its victims’ devices hostage until they pay a ransom.
Ransomware is not new. Five years ago, criminals in Eastern Europe began holding PC users’ devices hostage with similar tools. The scheme was so successful that security experts say many cybercriminals have abandoned spam and fake antivirus frauds to take up ransomware full time. By 2012, security experts had identified more than 16 gangs extorting millions from ransomware victims around the world.
Now those same criminals are taking their scheme mobile, successfully infecting Android devices at disturbing rates. In just the last 30 days, roughly 900,000 people were infected with a form of ransomware called “ScarePackage,” according to Lookout, a San Francisco-based mobile security firm.
“This is, by far, the biggest U.S. targeted threat of ransomware we’ve seen,” said Jeremy Linden, a senior security product manager at Lookout. “In the past month, a single piece of malware has infected as many devices in the U.S., as a quarter of all families of malware in 2013.”
In addition to Scare Package, Mr. Linden and a team at Lookout have also been tracking another strain of ransomware dubbed “ColdBrother,” or “Sypeng,” which not only locks users out of their device, but can take a photo from the device’s camera, can answer and drop phone calls and search for banking applications on the device.
And in just the last three weeks, Lookout discovered a new form of ransomware called ScareMeNot, which has already managed to infect more than 30,000 Android devices.
See the rest of the article
See the rest of the article
No comments:
Post a Comment