Hummer: Have you ever thought about how much hackers can win and if it is worth distributing malware? Installing malicious apps and pop-up games on your smartphone can be considered one of the most profitable jobs as it generates very high profits for crooks.
Cheetah Mobile security researchers have uncovered one of the most productive Trojan in the world, which has infected millions of Android devices.
Ονομάζεται Hummer trojan και εγκαθιστά ύπουλα κακόβουλες εφαρμογές, παιχνίδια, ή ακόμα και porn applications in phones of his victims. And according to the researchers, it pays more than 500.000 dollars on a daily basis to its creators.
It was first discovered in 2014 by Cheetah Mobile. Hummer has since gained ground in early 2016, when the Trojan infected "about 1,4 million devices daily at its peak" with 63.000 infections occurring daily in China.
“This Trojan pops up ads on mobile phones of victims, which is extremely disturbing," the researchers report in their blog.
"It installs silent games and porn applications in the background. Unwanted applications appear on these devices, and once the owners remove them, they are still there after a while. ”
Although the number of infected phones has declined, Hummer continues to infect nearly 1 million new devices a day, making it the most widespread trojan in the world.
Whenever Hummer installs a new application on infected systems, its developers earn 50 cents. So the Trojan development team is believed to have earned more than half a million dollars a day.
How does Hummer work?
Once a device is infected with Hummer, Trojan rooting on the phone to gain administrator privileges, allowing it to install discreetly unwanted applications, games, porn and other malware in the background.
The bad news for the affected users is that removing the Hummer is extremely difficult, if not impossible. No one can get rid of it easily because Trojan has the administrator-level phone control, making it impossible for traditional antivirus tools to remove it.
But it doesn't stop there. It is impossible to delete the Trojan by factory reset settings, due to Hummer being equipped with 18 different root exploits.
Victims of malware are found everywhere:
India (154.248), Indonesia (92.889), Turkey (63.906), China (63.285) and Mexico (59.192) are only the top five countries where Hummer has the most victims. .
