Tech firms take down WireX Android botnet A coalition of tech firms has taken down the WireX botnet, a malware network run predominantly off Android phones running subverted apps. The botnet first popped up on security researchers' radars on August 2 in a small way, and within weeks the number of infected nodes had reached the tens of thousands. It appears that the …
"That Google, with all its resources, can't do the same isn't very impressive and will only help the popularity of iOS"
It's much more tedious and time consuming (3 days seems normal but it has been two weeks in the past) to release an app to the Apple Store than Google Play. Google *could* keep things as secure as Apple but they've chosen to make it easier for developers to upload apps and gives a turnaround time sometimes less than an hour.
So it's not that it can't, it's that they've chosen not to.
Well, there is, but the solution may actually be worse than the problem, in some respects. It involves treating all users like children, penning them into a walled garden, and "protecting" them from things that are, in many cases, not really dangerous at all, but are just in conflict with the vendor's attempts to sell your soul to the highest bidder.
Oh, and some are legitimately dangerous, which makes a fantastically convenient pretext for that nice big wall.
And ... it turns out the this wall doesn't actually keep nasties out after all, but just ignore that and look at the Wookie!
The result is that the rest of us suffer restrictions imposed for the sake of, erm (how shall I put this kindly?), the Great Unwashed, who frantically click on all manner of shite, without the slightest care in the world about such trivia as user reviews, provenance or developer reputation, in a seemingly desperate bid to stuff their devices with as much malware as possible.
One of the more annoying consequences of this mindless stupidity is that people like me, who root their phones to be able to do a few things that might actually be useful for a change, become technical pariahs to the likes of banks and, much more bizarrely, as I discovered quite recently, bus companies.
Yes, rooted devices are blacklisted from viewing a fucking bus timetable.
So, to the idiots of the world, I'd just like to say a big "thank you". You bring joy to my life.
Surely the next big thing is the malicious actors sussing out the 'Bouncer' system wholesale and creating bots that grow within 6 months to hundreds of thousands.
I'm thinking apps such as the face swap apps and these sorts of crazes, with seemingly low numbers of face swap apps from large coding houses, instead many curious little coding houses offer them.
Because very few people run AV or have MDM full lock down on their Android phones....
I don't imagine such a patch (for the attack vector) involves pushing anything to a phone. More likely to be patching their automated scanner for their play store with some heuristics to flag up such techniques. But criticism about the difficulty Android manufacturers seem to have in promptly providing patches is definitely warranted.
"but that patch will not ever be deployed to 99% of devices."
Not until Google starts directly controlling Android updates...
The trouble is, the very same people who howl and rant about Windows 10 forced updates would probably welcome the same thing from Google with open arms...
> The botnet was used to launch distributed denial of service attacks by spamming out HTTP GET requests until website connections crumbled under the load
I would have thought that a slowloris DDOS would have been more effective from a mobile device and much harder to detect.
There needs to be a Class action lawsuit against google for not disclosing/alerting people that have previously downloaded malicious apps from their play store.
You need a valid Email to download apps, so why aren't they sending notices when they pull apps from the store for malicious activity? Lazy, afraid of: pushback, refund demands, demands for cleaning apps to remove the malware. Either way, if a food company acted like that they would end up being shut down.
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