At least one manufacturer of smartphones running on the United States market has serious security issues, according to the US authorities.
BLU Products is one of the Companies which sells Android smartphones in the United States and some other South American countries, and apparently marketed around 120.000 devices that probably send text messages (and more) in China.
Security researchers recently discovered a backdoor in the form of pre-installed software that tracks its user's geographic location smartphone, as well as all his conversations as well as text messages.
The said software then sends all the information to China every 72 hours. The secret software was developed by a Chinese company called Shanghai Adups Technology and according to the researchers, runs on more than 700 million cell phones phones worldwide.
So the problem does not seem to be limited to 120.000 Android smartphones released by BLU Products in the United States.
In addition, the security company that found the backdoorKryptowire) claims that Adups software transmits the full contents of text messages, contact lists, call logs, geolocation information and more data on a Chinese server according to the New York Times.
According to Adups developers, the software is designed to help Chinese phone manufacturers monitor the behavior of users. The company also claims that the software version found on BLU's mobile devices was not intended for the US market.
Meanwhile, BLU Products secretly removed the software from its smartphone as soon as it was updated by security researchers.
According to BLU head Samuel Ohev-Zion, the presence of the backdoor was something they did not know, and that's why they removed it immediately as soon as they learned it.
It is also worth noting that the Chinese company Adups provides software to much larger mobile phone makers such as ZTE and Huawei, which have Android smartphones around the world, not just China.
