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has been spreading mainly in Russia, Europe, and Southwest Asia on Android 6 and 7 devices (which while old and out of date, make up around 15 per cent of the current user base) for the past year from unofficial app stores.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


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  • (Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday April 09 2020, @12:35PM

    by sjames (2882) on Thursday April 09 2020, @12:35PM (#980553) Journal

    That's the thing with smartphones, they make them such that you can really brick it. It's hard to brick a PC without opening it up and physically manipulating the hardware in bad ways. You might wipe all your data, it might not even boot, but given an install disk, the PC itself isn't bricked.

    There are even mainboards with two copies of the BIOS so you can recover if you mess one up, then flash the corrupted image back to factory and safely try again.

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