The IT Nerd

It’s recently come to light that 10 million Android phones might have been infected with a piece of malware called HummingBad which can take root in your phone, collect your personal data and making it act like you’ve clicked on ads that you haven’t. That’s not good. But it’s far from the only bad actor out there. So the question is, how do you find out if you’re infected by something. Then how do you protect yourself.

First, let’s talk about detection. You have to run an anti-virus app on your phone to detect HummingBad or any other nasty piece of malware. My suggestion would be to use something from a reputable AV company such as the following:

• Check Point Zone Alarm
• Lookout
• AVG
• Avast

Any of these will find the sort of stuff that can make your life miserable and kill it. But in the event that whatever anti-virus app can’t kill whatever it finds, your only course of action is to backup your contacts and data and reset your phone. Not ideal, but it is effective.

Now, over to how to protect yourself. And I will say up front that some of you won’t like these suggestions. The main way that malware gets onto Android phones is when you get your apps from outside the Google Play Store. That’s not to say that it isn’t possible to get an infected app from the Google Play Store. But it’s far less likely to happen vs just getting an app from anywhere on the Internet. Thus if you are the type to grab apps from anywhere, don’t. Simply making that one change improves the odds that you will not be infected by anything. Another way to protect yourself is not to “root” the device as it not only opens you up to security risks, but likely voids the warranty of your phone too. Not good on either front. And quite frankly it’s not worth the risk. Thus to keep yourself safe, don’t do it.

Are there any other suggestions that you can think of? If there are, please leave a comment and share your thoughts.

If you’re a user of Android and you do a search, you’ll soon have the ability to install said app straight from the search result and bypass the Google Play store. Here’s how it will work:

• If the search result brings up an app, you’ll see an ‘Install’ icon next to it.
• Rather than redirecting you to the store, it will bring up the permissions screen directly and, once you’ve accepted them, the app will be installed.

What could possibly go wrong? Seeing as Google has had problems keeping bad apps off the Google Play store, I can easily see this leveraged to deliver malware and other rogue apps that will pwn your device. Though Google will have to speak to how they plan to mitigate that. I had a look around online and I couldn’t find anything that spoke to that. So it’s a bit of an open question.

This is being rolled out as we speak according to Android Police. But this is something that is going blow up for Google in a bad way. I’m calling it now.

Hot off the heels of maliciously crafted text messages allowing a bad guy to pwn your Android phone comes this new vulnerability. According to Trend Micro, it’s a maliciously crafted media file that is the attack vector:

We have discovered a vulnerability in Android that can render a phone apparently dead – silent, unable to make calls, with a lifeless screen. This vulnerability is present from Android 4.3 (Jelly Bean) up to the current version, Android 5.1.1 (Lollipop). Combined, these versions account for more than half of Android devices in use today. No patch has been issued in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) code by the Android Engineering Team to fix this vulnerability since we reported it in late May.

This vulnerability can be exploited in two ways: either via a malicious app installed on the device, or through a specially-crafted web site. The first technique can cause long-term effects to the device: an app with an embedded MKV file that registers itself to auto-start whenever the device boots would case the OS to crash every time it is turned on.

Lovely. One other thing to consider is that like the other vulnerability that I linked to, it may take a very long time to get this fixed, assuming that you get it fixed at all. You can blame the fact that the responsibility for Android OS is so fragmented for that.

Let’s see how long it takes before exploits show up in the wild.