Android malware bug, how to deal with it
Android’s ever-growing app market offers thousands of useless and admittedly very useful apps, and just like Apple’s app store, it’s generally prone to dodgy apps created by people with the sole purpose of stealing valuable data from the users.
The latest wave of ‘dogy’ apps comes from apps submitted by 3 users that have malicious code in them, this code has now been identified as malware by Google. Therefore, Google has taken steps to remove these apps, however, it has revealed that anyone who has downloaded these apps might have already had their sensitive data stolen.
The malware in question was called ‘DroidDream’ and acted a bit like a covert Trojan. It collectively collected information about the daily activity of users, focused on the most used ones, and then calculated the inputs to gain access to the sensitive data of Android users.
What this means is that you might already be infected with malware or not, this all depends on whether you have downloaded any of these apps (now removed by Google) from the Android market; falling down, great guitar solo, super story draft, Photo editor, Super ringtone maker, great sex positions, hot sexy videos, chess, screaming sexy japanese girls, Dodge the falling ball, Scientific calculator, dice roller, Advanced Currency Converter, app uninstaller, funny painting and Spiderman.
Among these removed apps were also pirated apps from legitimate versions removed by Google, all of which were made in China. Apparently, Google will try to trace the source of these scammer apps and they already know their usernames, however, location and actual identification will be a much more complicated process.
What should you do?
If you have downloaded any of the apps mentioned above, it is almost certain that you might be infected and your Android phones might have malicious hidden code. The first step, naturally, you should do is to remove the app completely from your Android phone, and if you can reboot your phone from a previously saved backup (which should be recent if you store phone numbers and download music or apps daily) .
The second thing to do is after you have restored your phone from backup, then reboot the phone from power off position to bring back the original function state.
After this, you will probably have gotten rid of any remaining malicious code that could harm you. I recommend being very careful about which apps you download in the future, and always download from reputable authors and companies alike. One of the main giveaways to scammer app submitters is that they have digits at the end of their name that don’t correspond to anything, like 3322001910.