Cheetah Mobile Malware Analysis Suggests Number of Infected Android Tablets May Be Higher
More than 17,000 Android tablets manufactured in China, currently being sold on Amazon, has been found to contain pre-installed malware.
Android has always been vulnerable to attacks, and developers have been coming up with new types of malware-targeting devices running on Google’s operating system.
Earlier this year, security firm G Data discovered that a large number of China-made smartphones belonging to well-known brands such as Huawei, Lenovo and Xiaomi come with malware which are believed to have been installed sometime between the manufacture and distribution of the devices, according to Softpedia.
Recently, scores of users have been complaining online about being unable to uninstall apps and seeing a flood of pop-up ads on their infected tablets.
All the tablets infected with malware are running on Google’s Android operating system and were acquired through Amazon, which still continues to sell the cheap tablets.
Cheetah Mobile, which is well known for introducing popular mobile tools such as Clean Master, found that thousands of tablets purchased from Amazon were infected with the Trojan Cloudsota. Cheetah Mobile found 17,233 devices manufactured in China to be infected with Cloudsota, including brands such as Alldaymall Tablet, FUSION5, JEJA 7 Zoll, JYJ 7 Tagital and Rapid Wave Yuntab SZ.
According to Cheetah Mobile, Cloudsota has been around for some time and usually resides in the infected device without its user being aware. The malware silently installs adware and malware on the device and is also capable of changing the wallpaper, redirecting searches, replacing the home page with another browser and showing pop-up ads. Cloudsota has root privileges and can reinstall even after the user has removed it, reports Digital Trends.
Cheetah Mobile believes that the number of tablets infected with the malware could be higher since Cloudsota prevents detection by uninstalling the security tools in the device, according to Business Insider.
