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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
An Android malware package likened to a Russian matryoshka nesting doll has security researchers raising the alarm, since it appears it's almost impossible to get rid of.
Known as xHelper, the malware has been spreading mainly in Russia, Europe, and Southwest Asia on Android 6 and 7 devices (which while old and out of date, make up around 15 per cent of the current user base) for the past year from unofficial app stores. Once on a gizmo, it opens a backdoor, allowing miscreants to spy on owners, steal their data, and cause mischief.
It has only recently been picked apart by Kaspersky Lab bods, and what makes the malware particularly nasty, the researchers say, is how it operates on multiple layers on the tablets and handsets it infects.
"The main feature of xHelper is entrenchment," explained Igor Golovin on Tuesday. "Once it gets into the phone, it somehow remains there even after the user deletes it and restores the factory settings."
[...] The best thing to do, though, is go a step further than a factory reset, and erase the flash memory completely, including the system partition, and put in a fresh clean copy. "If you have Recovery mode set up on your Android smartphone," said Golovin, "you can try to extract the libc.so file from the original firmware and replace the infected one with it, before removing all malware from the system partition. However, it’s simpler and more reliable to completely reflash the phone."
Even better advice is to avoid downloading any suspicious apps from the Google Play Store, just to be safe, and definitely don't use unauthorized third-party stores at all.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by epitaxial on Wednesday April 08 2020, @08:21PM (3 children)
Sounds like the majority of Android phones. Unless you buy a flagship phone from Samsung don't expect any more than one or two updates.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2020, @09:30PM
No risk then to my Android 4 phone.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday April 08 2020, @09:41PM
That is probably true, certainly for some of the older phones and phones in the various budget segments as they can't even be updated anymore -- they usually lack memory, storage etc to even get the newer updates so they are just shit out of luck in that regard.
Then I guess it's that whole issue of actually updating your phone. Most people just don't bother with it, they get a new phone instead.
Funny, not funny ha-ha, thing about it I wasn't even allowed to update my last work phone since it would break the APP used for a lot of inter-office communication etc (schedule sharing etc). So there is probably that aspect of it to.
Sure things look so much greener over there in the Apple garden ... no poison apples or snakes there ...
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday April 09 2020, @03:31PM
I just bought a new Motorola to replace my aging Kyocera, and as soon as it was set up it informed me of an available update, which I promptly downloaded and installed. That's quite unlike my three year old Acer tablet, a real piece of shit that got its first update last fall.
I never do commerce on the phone or tablet any way. In person or on the PC.
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