People in Hong Kong demanding a resign of the territory’s leader, C.Y. Leung have been hit with a malware that infiltrates the protestors mobile devices, irrespective of what platform they are using. Hackers have infected the Apple and Android smartphones of people protesting about the leader.
It is comparatively abnormal for the hackers to target both the iOS and Android devices at once. The attacks on the Apple and Android users is very low and attacking them both at once clearly indicates that a big force is behind them. It could be the government or the state-sponsored hackers who has done it.
“Cross-platform attacks that target both iOS and Android devices are rare, and indicate that this may be conducted by a very large organization or nation-state,” Lacoon researchers wrote in a blog post yesterday. “The fact that this attack is being used against protesters and is being executed by Chinese-speaking attackers suggests it’s linked to Chinese government cyber activity.”
The first malware which was spotted comes as an app to support the protestors and help them co-ordinate with one each other. However, under the hood the app was able to execute malicious activities such as stealing the user info. Next in the line was iOS malware, which was again designed to steal the user information residing on the device.
According to Lacoon. ”We haven’t seen anything which has this level of sophistication on iOS, and we’ve never seen something that has a Chinese attribution,” says Michael Shaulov, Lacoon’s co-founder and chief executive officer.
The malwares are designed in a such a way that when it is inside your device, it can easily access the device contacts, files, pictures, call logs and every other details that has been stored on the device. It is technically impossible to infiltrate the latest iOS. However, analysts believe that the hackers might have developed a technique that jailbreaks the devices on the fly.
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“It is technically impossible to infiltrate the latest iOS.” Wow… You sound so stupid
“Cross-platform attacks that target both iOS and Android devices are rare, and indicate that this may be conducted by a very large organization or nation-state,” No, it’s really not. It doesn’t happen much because the attacker typically chooses one target, or the other. It happens on both all the time though. I program in Java/Android SDK and Objective-C for iOS. Creating a simple app that steals data from the phone is a piece of cake. The author of this article sounds completely ignorant. Report the news, not your interpretation of the news.