As reported by Shanghai Daily, a virus is sweeping across China's smartphones affecting over 1 million users and turning them into zombie spam bots. The virus is similar to the Troj/SymbSms, a malware which infected Russian smartphones earlier this year.
A variant of that virus also was used to attack Android smartphones, posing as a media player. Once the phone is infected, which is accomplished when a user clicks on a link to install a fake anti-virus program on the phone, the virus broadcasts the user’s SIM information to the hackers servers.
Once the hacker has the information, it accesses the address book and sends out pay-per-click ads to others users. These links are infected as well and will compromise other phones as soon as the links are clicked.
The Russian virus which created chaos last year, used the same modus operandi, but its goal was to send out premium text messages. This virus is costing Chinese customers over 2 million yuan a day, while the hackers reap the benefits
The Government is struggling to find the source of the virus which is said to be very clever in the way that it evades most anti-virus programs available to users. As of now, there is no known solution to the problem.
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