New Delhi: If a report is to be believed, researches have detected a new piece of malware that is infecting Android devices. It attacks a device and remotely disables it until users pay a hefty sum of money.
Android-Trojan.Koler.A malware, with the help of your phone's geolocation technology, discovers which country you are in and sends you an alert that appears to be from your government's law enforcement agency. The alert tells you that you have been caught watching illegal pornography, and suggests that you can settle these charges by paying a certain sum of money.
This malicious program has been discoverd 18 months after researchers from Symantec found that so-called ransomware extorts around $5 million a year from PC users. Ransomware is a term that is used to describe malware that disables devices and asks to pay to purported law-enforcement agencies before the device are restored.
"The ransomware's main component is a browser view that stays on top of all other applications," reports ArsTechnica citing Bitdefender Senior E-Threat Analyst Bogdan Botezatu wrote in an e-mail. "You can press Home and go to the homescreen, but a timer would bring it back on top in about 5 seconds. I managed to uninstall it manually by swiftly going to applications and dragging the icon on the Uninstall control, but it only works if the application icon is on the first row. Otherwise, one wouldn't have the necessary time to drag it to the top, where the uninstall control is located," he adds.
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