Pages

Saturday, February 2, 2013

That big, scary call recording malware isn't in the Android Market

Here we go again, folks. Look -- malware, by definition, is bad and absolutely should be taken seriously. So when Total Defense (née CA Community -- it's a rebranding thing) points out that it's possible for some rogue code to record your phone calls and even send them off to some far-away land (China, of course), well, it's something that we all need to pay attention to. But things also need a little perspective. Total Defense tells us that it's received just four cases of this malware, from 13 unique sources, for 14 total incidents, and TD can't tell us with any specificity just how prevalent this piece of malware is. There are more than 550,000 Android devices being activated every day. Perspective, ya know. Now, as far as your likelihood of being affected by this piece of malware, Total Defense tells us: "there are very high chances as anybody can customize this to lure their victims to fall into the trap." Scary, ain't it? Only, here's the thing, and it's an important one for most of you: Not a single instance of this malware was reported from coming from an app in the Android Market. That's not to say malicious apps haven't made it into the Market before -- it's happened, and it'll happen again, and we suspect Google will act as swiftly as it has in the past. But unless you're wandering around app "stores" you probably shouldn't be wondering around in the first place, we wouldn't worry too much.

No comments:

Post a Comment