“You are guilty of child porn, child abuse, zoophilia or sending out bulk spam. You are a criminal,” Nicole Perlroth reports for The New York Times. “The Federal Bureau of Investigation has locked you out of your phone and the only way to regain access to all your data is to pay a few hundred dollars.”
“That message — or variations of it — has popped up on hundreds of thousands of people’s Android devices in just the last month. The message claims to be from the F.B.I., or cybersecurity firms, but is in fact the work of Eastern European hackers who are hijacking Android devices with a particularly pernicious form of malware, dubbed ‘ransomware’ because it holds its victims’ devices hostage until they pay a ransom,” Perlroth reports. “In just the last 30 days, roughly 900,000 people were infected with a form of ransomware called ‘ScarePackage,’ according to Lookout, a San Francisco-based mobile security firm.”
Perlroth reports, “‘This is, by far, the biggest U.S. targeted threat of ransomware we’ve seen,’ said Jeremy Linden, a senior security product manager at Lookout. ‘In the past month, a single piece of malware has infected as many devices in the U.S., as a quarter of all families of malware in 2013.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: “Open,” as in: Wide.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
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Good thing I do nightly system backups on my Note 2. If that happened to me, just do a factory reset and ROM wipe, then restore from the last known good backup
Wich backup is the “last known good backup?” How long has the ransonware been sitting idle on your device waiting to pounce?
Just run a process viewer to see which app is doing it. If I can’t do it on the phone itself, I have USB debugging enabled so I could just hook it to my PC and use ADB debugging.
Worse comes to worst, just nuke the whole thing and start anew.. I keep everything I consider important on my phone on cloud storage, everything else can just be copied back over via USB when I get the chance
WOW!
You are right. Just nuke the whole thing including your samdung phone.
That will certainly work !!
It will work.
Especially if he buys an iPhone after nuking his samsung phone.
LOL
by nuke I meant completely reformat and wipe the entire device. I assumed people would understand what ‘nuke’ meant in this context.
I think what WOW, YES mean that you should nuke your old samdung phone and go for iPhone!
The iPhone 5c, which is currently the latest iPhone if I’m not mistaken, uses a 1.3 GHz dual core CPU and a 1136 x 640 pixel screen. The absolute bare minimum to be technically considered HD is 1080 x 720. It’s not even an HD phone.
it’s 2014. Not 2010. Why the fuck would I want something like that?
1280 x 720** Typo
Oh I dunno….why the fuck would you want a smartphone using an antique 32bit processor….
Maybe so you don’t have to nuke the piece of shit after a ransomware attack? Or dick around having to debug it all the time? Just guessing.
Why the fuck do you want to come here and let everyone know what a dickwad loser you are? I guess it’s just another one of life’s little mysteries.
The fact that you reference the iPhone 5c, Apple’s “cheap” iPhone, tells me that you are not interested in comparing equal products. FYI, the current flagship is the iPhone 5S. But I guess if you were being honest, dracoazule, you would have admitted that.
So productive you are with such technical prowess. Me? I do not have to wast my technical prowess on such things as you describe. Why? Because AAPL HAS THIER SHIT TOGETHER IDIOT STICK!
It doesn’t take much technical prowess to properly maintain your smartphone. And by ‘AAPL HAS THIER SHIT TOGETHER IDIOT SUCK!’ (sic) you mean “AAPL PTS US N A PAYPIN EVIRNMENT CUZ WE CNT TAK CAR UF URSELFS’
Looks like that android keyboard software isn’t working to well for you…maybe it has a spell check feature? Or are you using WinBLOWS?
Commenting from his basement no doubt. Pff
All Android keyboards have a spell check feature. Not that I really need it. I was making fun ijah420’s lack of spelling abilities.
And I am using Windows. It’s running on a PC I built myself for a total of about $1,700. You know, about the same price you paid for that mid range Macbook that probably doesn’t even support 4 monitors in a basic Eyefinity config.
Isn’t that special
Running Windoze 8.1 . BOZO’s Circus 2.0. Not my Circus Not My Monkey’s.
typical windows user:
“I built myself” and saved money because I’m such a loser my TiME is worth NOTHING.
ever figure that in the time you took to build that PC, study how to do it, source the parts , check the parts, send the parts back if they are wrong, test it… the Mac dude has made hundreds of dollars to make up above 1700 to buy a sleek award winning Macbook Pro or iMac or even a MacPro? A Mac which ALSO HAS GREAT RESALE VALUE? try selling your homemade can in a couple of years …
How many hundreds of hours did you spend to LEARN how to build a PC and source the parts?
If you’re paid just 30 bucks and hour 10 hrs is 300 bucks.
I posted the above the time wasted in building PCs (they never factor the cost their time in their estimates) and got a bunch of one stars from Winblows trolls yet none of them posted back to argue what was wrong with my logic.
I’m pretty sure dracoazule is actually Sarah Palin.
Such a SCSI dip switch you are.
In the last two years I’ve actually had to turn my iPhone 5 off and back on once. My time is too valuable to dick around with processes to resurrect Korean junk, and I’m not so juvenile as to brag about my tech expertise.
Apparently you have no problems with bragging about everything else though.
Oh that rich. I’ll just tell Granny to “run the process viewer” on her Android phone to fix it. More proof that you have to be a total chiphead just to use Android OS.
Actually, this story is not about a new threat to Androids.
It is FUD to scare Android users into buying security software. Probably an old Android exploit with a new twist (as in twist your arm, ransom)
Only a tiny minority of Adroid users are capable of doing that level of maintenance on their phones. But you guys love to blame the user for all the problems they have with the OS, dontcha?
Meanwhile, iOS users bask in the comfort of their walled garden.
It’s more like a padded playpen really.
actually…no…not really…android manufacturers haven’t learned from the past mistakes of microsoft. Pushing out the cheapest products for the sake of marketshare only opens them up for attacks like this. I hope android keeps their low end marketshare, all these attacks will consistently target android 🙂
Stand strong! Don’t pay the ransom. The Android phone was never worth the price the are asking for it. Not now or when you first purchased it.
Wow 900,000 customers and no marketing plan or department needed.
This is cruel!! They’re taking money from the fool and poor
More $s from those who bought the “cheap alternative” to an iPhone.
I believe it’s only a matter of time before all of my acquaintances who have bought into the Android camp realize the utter absurdity of their position. I actually am looking forward to the day, as long as it is not accompanied by a terrorist attack that has taken advantage of the idiocy on display here.
I got ransomware on my Android cell phone, wile it was off, the SIM out, and battery removed…
It’s called Android.
Open always wins, for the criminals.
GOOGLE: This is YOUR fault. 😛
Just last week, a friend who develops for Android told me it is impossible for Android to get stuff like this because “Android is based on Linux”. He then went on to say how Apple sabotages iPhones the closer they get to announcing new ones.
So your friend develops neither security software nor ransomeware — good for him!! But is he making any money developing for what’s left over?
/slight sarcasm, real curiosity
Apparently you hang out with morons
And Bubble Yum was so tasty and soft because they put spider eggs in it.
Spread ’em, bitch!
Eric Schmidt did this on purpose for when Steve Jobs called to accuse him of stolen product. Schmidt can say, “We didn’t copy you. See, iOS secured. Android OS not. Big Difference!”
Had he known Judge Koh would rule against Apple at every turn he would have gone ahead and copied the security model, too.
I Read some of the comments at the source article and the Android fans are basically in complete denial. I think the only way to get through to these knuckleheads is to report this on television. 900K infected in 30 days is a big deal.
If this were happening to IOS, it would be front page news with reporters banging down the doors in Cupertino to get a response.
It’s a feature.
I never understood S&M
but from the photos I’ve seen at least it’s usually a sexy chick doing it to you.
for android users, it’s like S&M but it’s Eric Schmidt and Chairman Lee and a host of hairy malware purveyors doing it to you….
yuuuuuch
But those Android users keep bending over asking : “MORE ! MORE! “.