Android now 'mobile world's equivalent' of Windows for hackers

Android platform

CSO - The capabilities of malware targeting the market-leading Android platform are mimicking those of Trojans that have wrung profits from Windows PC users for years, a new study shows.

With nearly an 80 percent market share, Android's mobile dominance parallels Windows in the PC world, making Google's operating system the "mobile world's equivalent," Kaspersky Lab said in its latest Threat Evolution report, released on Thursday.

The difference between Windows and Android malware is that the latter is evolving much quicker, as criminals borrow from what they learned in targeting PCs since the 1990s.

"The evolution of Android malware has gone much more quickly than the evolution of Windows malware," Roel Schouwenberg, a senior researcher for Kaspersky Lab, toldCSOonline.

Android now 'mobile world's equivalent' of Windows for hackers | Network World

Japanese police bust poker-playing IT boss for Android malware

Android malware

Japanese police bust poker-playing IT boss for Android malwarePolice in the Chiba Prefectural zone of Japan have arrested nine people suspected of making nearly $4m by distributing malware that harvested mobile user's contact information and using it for a fake dating website.

The arrests came after a joint operation between the police and Symantec, and the security company reports that the possible ringleader of the group is Masaaki Kagawa, president of IT firm Koei Planning and a semi-professional poker player who has netted over $1.5m in winnings from tournament play over in the last six years.

Since 2007 he's competed in a variety of games on the international poker circuit in London, Las Vegas, Monte Carlo, and Australia, with some success and the occasional massive loss. If convicted, however, Kagawa won't be playing high-stakes poker for some time to come.

Kagawa and his associates are accused of using a wide variety of applications to spread the Android malware, Enesoluty, across third-party Android apps forums via 150 hosted domains. The malware harvested the email addresses of its victims, and it seems these were used to drive traffic to a phony dating website.

Japanese police bust poker-playing IT boss for Android malware | The Register

Windows Version of the Janicab Malware

Last week, F-Secure wrote about a script-based malware targeting Mac users. Yesterday, the folks from avast! revealed a Windows version.

Janicab Malware

Here is a summary of the difference between the Windows and OS X version:

Differences between the Windows and OS X version

 Windows Version of the Janicab Malware | F-Secure

Researchers To Highlight Weaknesses In Secure Mobile Data Stores

With employees increasingly working from their personal devices, companies are searching for ways to protect sensitive data from whatever might be inhabiting those untrusted mobile environments.

Weaknesses in secure mobile data stores

One method, frequently referred to as a secure container, uses an encrypted data store to protect the business information on the device from malware or an unauthorized user. Yet, such precautions are not enough, says Michael Shaulov, CEO of Israeli startup Lacoon Mobile Security, which will show off ways to circumvent the protection of secure containers this month at Black Hat USA in Las Vegas.

Any malware or user that has access to the operating system will be able to undermine the integrity of the encryption used for most, if not all, secure containers included as part of a mobile device management (MDM) solution, Shaulov says.ng those untrusted mobile environments.

Weaknesses In Secure Mobile Data Stores | The Dark Reading

A look at Point of Sale RAM scraper malware and how it works

A special kind of malware has been hitting the headlines recently - that which attacks the RAM of Point of Sale (PoS) systems. Although it's been getting quite a bit of publicity recently, we actually first identified it as a threat back in December 2009 and wrote about it in an article on Naked Security entitled Will RAM scraping loosen the sky and make it fall?.

Point of Sale RAM

Answering that question today, it just might!

Actually, the situation isn't that bad - yet - but this malware family has definitely become more complex and far-reaching. In this article, we take a step back from the technical details and look at the evolution of PoS RAM scrapers.

A look at Point of Sale RAM scraper malware and how it works | The Naked Security

'BinaryPig' Uses Hadoop To Sniff Out Patterns In Malware

As the menagerie of malware collected by security firms continues to multiply, researchers are looking for new ways to analyze the massive data sets to find interesting information in their malware zoos.

Black Hat Security

At the Black Hat Security Briefings in late July, one trio of researchers plans to release a framework for using Hadoop and the Apache Pig platform for parallelization that makes analyzing large sets of malware programs easier. The three researchers -- Zachary Hanif, Telvis Calhoun, and Jason Trost of Endgame Systems -- developed the framework, dubbed BinaryPig, while trying to analyze a quickly growing collection of millions of malware samples collected by the company over the past three years.

Analyzing large sets of malware programs | Dark Reading

Ransomware locks Android smartphones

The threat posed by malware disguised as anti-virus software which locks the desktop and tries to extort money to unlock it has now spread to Android smartphones. Away from the Google Play Store, Symantec has discovered one such piece of malware which, like the BKA trojan, uses pornographic content to extort money from users. The malware embeds itself deep in the system and doesn't stop annoying the user even after the ransom has been paid. Such malware has earned itself the name of ransomware on the desktop.

The Android ransomware markets itself as "Free Calls Update". Once installed, users find themselves confronted with a "trial version" of Android Defender. The software suffers from compatibility problems with some devices, but if it finds itself on a compatible phone, it launches straight into its con.

The malware would like to escalate its privileges 

Ransomware locks Android smartphones | The H Security

Google's Transparency Report shows malware spread

Thanks to Google's latest move to make its data more transparent, it is now possible to see the statistics on the presence of malware and of sites linking to malware.

Google has announced that it is expanding its transparency reporting to include statistics from its Safe Browsing programme. The Transparency Report, which also carries information about copyright removal requests and government agencies' and courts' demands for user data now has a Safe Browsing section. As part of that Safe Browsing data, Google is identifying autonomous systems (AS) on the internet and how much malware they contain. This is available through a Malware Dashboard.

Google's Transparency Report

Google's Transparency Report | The H Security