Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday April 08 2020, @07:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the rooted-in-your-phone dept.

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malware has been spreading mainly in Russia, Europe, and Southwest Asia on Android 6 and 7 devices (which while old and out of date, make up around 15 per cent of the current user base) for the past year from unofficial app stores.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.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday April 08 2020, @10:45PM (6 children)

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday April 08 2020, @10:45PM (#980412) Homepage Journal

    They obviously don't have near as many hand tools as I do. The vast majority of them are easily capable of ensuring the malware will never run on that phone again. There are some minor side effects to this approach though.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Funny=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Funny' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   3  
  • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2020, @11:00PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2020, @11:00PM (#980417)

    "They obviously don't have near as many hand tools as I do. The vast majority of them are easily capable of ensuring the malware will never run on that phone again. There are some minor side effects to this approach though."

    I see. So, in other words, it's necessary to kill the patient in order to save the patient? But I wouldn't exactly call it a "minor side effect" though.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2020, @11:10PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 08 2020, @11:10PM (#980426)

      Just to add, I wouldn't call it a "feature", either.

    • (Score: 2) by Kitsune008 on Wednesday April 08 2020, @11:39PM

      by Kitsune008 (9054) on Wednesday April 08 2020, @11:39PM (#980436)

      Save the patient?!?
      I see your problem.
      The phone is a tool. When it malfunctions, repair it, if it can't be repaired(or is not worth the effort...YMMV), then discard/destroy it.
      It's only a tool of convenience, you are not it's slave.

      BTW, they make pretty colors in my forge. :-)

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 09 2020, @12:35AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 09 2020, @12:35AM (#980446)

    The operation was a success, but the patient died. Sounds about right.