Latest Android Malware Takes Flight With Angry Birds

Malware was embedded in applications that promised to help users cheat their way through Rovio's popular Angry Birds game.

Xuxian Jiang, an assistant professor in computer science at North Carolina State University, last week found 10 applications infected with malware in the Android Market. On June 5, he reported it to Google, which suspended the applications on the same day. Jiang also contacted mobile anti-virus companies and research labs, including Lookout, Symantec, McAfee, CA, SmrtGuard, Juniper, Kinetoo, Fortinet, and others.

What is this latest threat?

In a blog post published last week, Jiang explained that this new malware, which his team named "Plankton" (after the pesky Spongebob character?) doesn't attempt to root Android phones. Rather, it was designed to run in the background secretly.

This particular piece of malware was embedded in applications that promised to help users cheat their way through Rovio's popular Angry Birds game (Angry Birds itself was not infected).

What does it do? Once the malware is fired up by the users, it loads a background service. That background service application scours the device for user data, including the device ID code, and reports it back to a remote server. The server parses the data and then sends a link back to the malware, which downloads an executable and then runs nearly invisible in the background.

The application then starts collecting more data, such as browser bookmarks, browser history, home page shortcuts, and runtime log information.

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