Bitdefender Labs has released Bitdefender USSD Wipe Stopper to protect Android users from a USSD attack. The app detects when a USSD code is accessed and notifies the user he’s about to trigger a potentially harmful USSD code. The Android dialer this week was found vulnerable to a remote wipe attack by means of passing specialized strings of characters with a certain prefix to the phone’s dialer. The attack...

iOS users should be very aware of how iOS apps handle their authentication credentials. The potential for both financial and personal data loss is high. To this end, Bitdefender is starting a series of short stories looking at the behavior of various iOS apps, using data from Clueful – the Bitdefender web app that tells you how your iOS apps are behaving. Texas Poker (Texas Hold'em) broadcasts usernames and...

Passwords are the last, and sometimes only, line of defense against online criminals. The average computer users know not to leave their critical passwords lying around for all to see. Some iOS app developers, however, are apparently less careful when handling users’ vital information. Bitdefender Labs analyzed some highly-rated free iOS apps starting from the premise that they should handle credentials wis...

We’ve seen our share of malware, adware and other interesting Android threats this summer. With autumn upon us, it’s time to recap the sizzling highlights that plagued our top 10 Android mobile malware summer charts. Although we didn’t start to break down adware until July, it’s worth mentioning that June kick started what we would later discover to be an avalanche of adware. In July, 77.34% of the total An...

Remember the old days when your PC was flooded by annoying pop-ups that sprung out of nowhere? That’s the type of aggressive adware that used to plague desktops and eventually caused system-wide errors. In some cases used to disseminate malware, such aggressive adware was a pain to remove and caused a lot of damage. We got so used to seeing ads while surfing the internet or checking our mail that we become ...

The mid-summer mobile malware report reveals not only that Android malware developers are interested in making money, but also that most threats we’ve dealt with are still going strong. For three months, we’ve been talking about the steady growth of adware-bundled apps. Now we’ve seen the percentage spike to 77.34% of the total of Android malware detections. This all-time high represents the total amount of...

With almost 600,000 apps on Google Play, tighter restrictions to regulate app quality are set in place by the search engine giant. In a recent letter to developers, Google outlined a new set of rules, which will hopefully police all spammy apps, cloned games, and malware from Google Play. A simple search for the word “race” in Google Play will reveal tons of apps that although pose as racing or sport simula...

Research conducted by Bitdefender, the award-winning provider of innovative antivirus solutions, has revealed almost one in five iOS apps can access a user’s iPhone Address Book, while some 41 percent can track your location and more than one in three store user data without encrypting it. The study of more than 65,000 apps distributed widely on the Apple App Store revealed tens of thousands tap contact inf...

A Trojan that steals contact details from Android-running devices was spotted with a bogus battery optimization app. Luring users with the promise of increased battery performance upon installation, the Trojan covertly scans address books and broadcasts phone numbers and email addresses to an attacker-controlled domain. After sending all contact details, it displays an image with a GONE visibility state, fo...

Bitdefender Labs stumbled on some interesting Android spyware that broadcasts your GPS location to a remote server on a regular basis. Hiding in the background and only displaying an icon that has “Store” written on it, the spyware boots up every time you reset your device or when you install/uninstall an app. Here’s the app’s icon:   It’s obvious that it tries to trick users into thinking it has store-like...