About 8,000 of Android as well as iPhone users were fooled by security researches. The users were asked to join a mobile smartphone “botnet” under the pretence of downloading innocuous weather app.
Daniel Tijerina and Derek Brown from TippingPoint’s Digital Vaccine Group presented the exercise in order to show how social engineering tricks can be developed as well as applied with PCs to a smartphone that offers access to the Internet. So before offering local weather forecasts, the WeatherFist app coordinates as well as telephone numbers.
Despite the fact that the app was not published officially on the iPhone as well as Android application, one should admit that it attracted a hundred of iPhones as well as other smartphones by means of third party app marketplaces like SlideME as well as Cydia.
According to researchers, they have created a malicious version of the app that is able to harvest data as well as post fake updates that can be found on social networking sites, moreover, the app is able to send spam.
In fact the experiment got positive write-ups from New Science as well as Dark Reading. But still other security firms were interested in the value of the experiment.
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