Image copyright AFP the Heimdal Danish company, operating in the field of computer security, revealed an attempt to spread the dangerous virus in the devices on the Android platform.
spreads via sms Posts Mazar virus is able to get administrator rights on your mobile phone to enable it to make calls, send text messages or completely erase its contents.
An exception are smartphones, which in the settings selected Russian language.
were sent to more than In addition to “catch” the virus, smartphone owner must disable the default option to download software only from trusted sources.
the company Heimdal believes that test messages from Mazar virus 100 thousand mobile phones in Denmark.
It is not clear whether such messages received by users in other countries.
This is the first time that a full-scale attack using the virus was detected.
As Heimdal experts found smartphone owners get an innocent-looking sMS with a link to a multimedia message.
This link is downloaded to your phone Tor browser that allows anonymous connections to the Internet. After that, through Tor downloaded the virus itself.
Apparently, this browser is used in order to hide the source of the spread of malicious programs.
Russian language
an interesting feature of the virus Mazar is that it can not be installed in smart phones on the Android platform, which as the main Russian language is selected.
These features were last detected in some computer viruses, says expert Heimdal Morten Kyarsgaard.
The owners infected with the phone virus susceptible to serious risk.
Criminals can secretly read all text messages, completely erase all personal information from the phone or send a large number of . message to premium rate numbers
“It can cause a lot of damage, for example, lead to the emergence of a large account that the phone owner will be obliged to pay, – says Morten Kyarsgaard -. And here the situation is different than credit card, where there are international standards for compensation of customers of losses by banks in the case of fraud “.
Advice to users
Heimdal tested phones on Android Kitkat platform (version 4.4), but Kyarsgaard He says that the virus is most likely can affect all previous versions. More recent versions of Android were not verified.
The advice that experts give smartphone users, is to not open links in text messages received from unknown numbers, and to be careful with links, even if the sms message received from the seemingly familiar sender, because sometimes the information can be teased
“More than one billion devices are protected Google Play software that daily scans of 200 million units,” -. said a spokesman for Google <. /> p>
“less than 1% of Android devices have downloaded in 2014 potentially dangerous applications, including – less than 0.15% of the devices, which are loaded with the program only Google Play”, – she added
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