Hummer: Have you ever thought about how much the hackers and if it's worth distributing malware? Installing malicious apps, and games with pop-up ads on your smartphone can be considered one of the most lucrative professions as it brings the fraudsters very high profits.
Cheetah Mobile security researchers have uncovered one of the most productive Trojan in the world that has infected millions of Android devices.
It's called the Hummer trojan and it sneakily installs malicious apps, games, or even porn apps on its victims' phones. Not according to them researchers pays out more than $500.000 on a daily basis to its creators.
Ανακαλύφθηκε για πρώτη φορά το 2014 από την Cheetah Mobile. Από τότε το Hummer φέρεται να κέρδισε έδαφος στις αρχές του 2016, όταν το Trojan μόλυνε "περίπου 1,4 εκατομμύρια συσκευές καθημερινά στο αποκορύφωμά της" με τις 63.000 μολύνσεις από αυτές να συμβαίνουν καθημερινά στην Κίνα.
"Αυτό το Trojan σκάει pop up διαφημίσεις στα mobile phones των θυμάτων, κάτι το οποίο είναι εξαιρετικά ενοχλητικό," αναφέρουν οι ερευνητές στο blog τους.
"Εγκαθιστά αθόρυβα παιχνίδια και πορνό εφαρμογές στο παρασκήνιο. Οι ανεπιθύμητες εφαρμογές εμφανίζονται σε αυτές τις συσκευές, και μόλις οι ιδιοκτήτες τις αφαιρέσουν, μετά από λίγο βρίσκονται ακόμα εκεί.."
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?
Just one device infected with Hummer, the Trojan roots the phone to gain administrator privileges, which allows it to discreetly install unwanted apps, games, porn apps, 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. .
