Android Trojan dubbed ‘Geinimi’ found in legitimate applications

[n2doc]

December 30, 2010 by John Messina

There’s a new threat affecting Android devices; the Trojan dubbed ‘Geinimi’ originates from China and is capable of gathering a significant amount of personal data from a user’s phone and send it to remote servers.

According to Lookout Mobile Security firm, Geinimi is the first Android malware that displays botnet-like capabilities. Once the malware has been installed on the user’s phone it can be taken over by receiving commands from a remote server.

Lookout states that Geinimi is effectively being “grafted” onto repackaged versions of legitimate applications, primarily games, and distributed in third-party Chinese Android app markets.

Some of the games that Lookout has identified are: Monkey Jump 2, Sex Positions, President vs. Aliens, City Defense and Baseball Superstars 2010. These are instances of the games repackaged with the Trojan; the original versions are available in the official Google Android Market and are not affected.

At the time of this writing, Geinimi has only been found being distributed through third-party Chinese app stores. Lookout has not found any applications compromised by the Geinimi Trojan in the official Google Android Market.

more
http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-android-trojan-dubbed-geinimi-legitimate.html

[uppityperson]

1. Aww, can 't play "Sex Positions" on my phone anymore. Gee whillikers!

[tavalon]

2. That's a rather transparent way to say,"Don't buy Chinese".

[The Doctor.]

3. Been waiting for this sort of cyberpunk for 20 years.

Too bad I've been dealing with too much extraneous shit to be on top of it by now.

[glinda]

4. HA! It is probably an overseas American Company based in China that works for DNS.

Just a thought.