Nowadays cyber criminals are increasingly getting more sophisticated and not just to attack the mobile users by the succulent data in them, as they also want to use it as terminal networks “zombie” of those who continue taking profit once they have been infected.
A Chinese Advertising Agency Using Malicious Software To Get More Clicks
The Chinese Advertising agencies are willing to reach great heights in the field of media marketing, hence they advertise product or service to learn as many people as possible. As we all know that in this field everything works virtually, which may also include malware.
According to the analysis and data of CheckPoint (It is an international provider of software and combined hardware and software products for IT security, including network security, endpoint security, data security and security management.) experts, Yingmob runs alongside a legitimate Chinese advertising analytics company, sharing its resources and technology. Reports of the cybersecurity company Check Point claims that the Chinese advertising analytics company “Yingmob” has distributed mobile device malware on a massive scale.
The Chinese advertising analytics company “Yingmob” is registered in Beijing which is a subsidiary of MIG Unmobi Technology Inc, and at first glance no different from any other promotional firm. In the high-quality design, the official website of the company offered services to provide easy to deploy advertising with text, images and video, without affecting the user experience.
However, as the Check Point researchers found, a division of the company called “the development team for international platforms”, has 25 employees, distributes HummingBad malware. This program is designed to display advertisements on infected devices. For each click on the banner, Yingmob receives payment. company income from such activities is $300 thousand. per month.
According to the experts, now malicious applications from Android-Yingmob are active on 10 million Android device. As the infection occurs via device attacks drive-by-download when a user goes to a malicious Web site and it downloads the malware.
According to Check Point, from Yingmob applications display over 20 million ads, and receive 2.5 million clicks per day. Over the same time period malware, HummingBad sets about 50 thousand fraudulent applications. Victims of the malware are mostly residents of China and India, but hundreds of thousands of infected devices are also in Turkey, the USA, Mexico, and Russia.
