Cybersecurity solutions provides checkpoint on Wednesday disclosed that “Agent Smith” is a new variant of Mobile malware that pretty much resembles with malware campaign such as “gooligan”, “Hummingbad” and “CopyCat”. The Malware, ‘Agent Smith’ has infected around 25 millions of Android devices around the world, including 15 million mobile devices in India. The prime targets of this mobile malware are basically the Hindi, Arabic, Russian and Indonesian speaking users. So, the major devices that are victims of this malware are from countries like India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. “Agent Smith” has not only targeted the Asian countries but it has also infected devices in the UK, Australia and the US.
As per the reports, Agent Smith is disguised as a Google-related application that was originally downloaded from the most popular third-party app store i.e. 9 Apps. The Malware is capable enough to exploit known Android vulnerabilities and automatically replaces installed applications with the malicious version without the user’s knowledge. It attacks the user-installed applications silently, making it challenging for the common Android users to figure it out that what’s wrong with their Android Smartphone. Reports also says that the malware can be easily used for intrusive and harmful purposes such as banking credential theft and eavesdropping.
For all the Android users, the checkpoint has worked closely with Google at the time of publishing and has assured that there are no malicious apps on the Play store. The best protection against intrusive mobile malware attack like Agent Smith is to adopt a ‘Hygiene First’ approach which is basically the combination of advanced threat prevention and threat intelligence, to safeguard the digital devices.
Third party store often lacks the security measures, so the Android users should only download an app from Trusted applications to avoid the risk of infection.
