Cheetah Mobile Security Research Lab announced that ‘Hummer,’ a newly found family of mobile Trojans, is currently the largest and most widely spread mobile virus around the World. The Hummer Trojan was first discovered earlier in January 2016 and has affected as many as 1.4 million mobile phones in a single day when at its peak at the end of March 2016.
Trojans from the ‘Hummer’ family are known to be deep-seated within the root of your mobile’s operating system. This obviously means Hummer affects Android phones. Simply restarting your phone or using a regular anti-virus just doesn’t cut it.
Cheetah Mobile Security Research Lab suggests the developers of Hummer are able to raise as much as $500,000 a day. Their research suggests that the average number of phones infected daily during January to June 2016 is 1.1 million devices.
Once Hummer makes its way onto your phone, the Trojan installs itself into a root directory. With access to your system’s root files, it can get its developers as much as $0.50 per application downloaded by it on the device. This is why many see unnecessary and new applications on smartphones without actually having downloaded them.
A test conducted on Hummer says that the Trojan accessed the Internet on the smartphone a total of 10,000 times and succeeded in downloading files accounting for 2GB of data usage to install a total of 200 APK files.
Data from the research shows while China has had as many as 63,000 phones infected per day, India still tops the World list of a total number of infected phones ranking a little under 1.6 million. In line after India come Indonesia, Turkey, China, and Mexico.
Host websites for the Hummer Trojans were traced as having IPs from China. Researchers say the widespread occurrence of the virus is primarily among markets where users tend to download applications from third-party providers where sources may not be trusted. Low-security measures of the app files hosted on third party app stores allow smaller files that host Trojans and viruses into your phone’s system.
On the other hand, the Google Play Store ensures that the best measures of security are taken to avoid any kind of malware or infection on your mobile device.
