Android Malware Forwards Your Messages To Russia

It turned out that the latest malware designed for Android will forward copies of your SMS to Russian criminals. It might appear very interesting for a Russian criminal to find out that you want pizza for dinner or that you cannot speak right now because of the important meeting, but it seems unclear what the hackers hope to achieve with a huge database of useless information.

Anyway, security companies call to admire the coding and tremble with fear at its results. The matter is that once installed, the malware can be used to steal sensitive messages for, say, blackmailing purposes. Worse still, the criminals can learn codes sent to your phone by banks to confirm online banking transactions. The only problem is that the crook would have to install the malware on a specific cell phone manually. This, as you can understand, is not the most efficient way of spreading trojans. Even after doing so, the hackers will then have to sort out the message they are looking for from a huge database created from everyone who had the virus on board.

In the meanwhile, the experts of the Russian security company Doctor Web dubbed the malware in question "Android.Pincer.2.origin". Upon running the trojan, the user will see a fake notification about the certificate's successful installation. However, after that the malware won’t perform any noticeable activities for a while. The security experts found out that the hackers can then send following instructions to the malware – for example, turn it on and off. In addition, the virus can change servers in case the current one is shut down.