Xbot: Trojan that steals banking credentials

There are thousands of apps available for almost everything and thousands of malware trying to enter and corrupt those apps and devices. Latest to join the league is Xbot. However, Xbot is not widespread yet but, it is targeting devices in Australia and Russia.

This new malware Xbot,  is said to be capable of wiping clean the affected phone as well as stealing online banking details stored on the device. It activity hijacking, a technique, to carry out attacks which are aimed at stealing online banking and personal details.

What is Activity hijacking?

 Activity hijacking takes advantage of features in Android versions prior to 5.0. Google. So, the real victims of this virus are only older devices or those that have not been updated.

It essentially allows the malware to launch a different action when someone tries to launch an application. User are unaware that they’re actually using the wrong program or function.

Recent Trojan Attacks on Google Play Store

We should also note that in first week of February, Google Play store was also under attack by a Trojan virus called Android Xiny. Where the malware has managed to find a way to Google Play Store by hiding itself inside the many apps. It is interesting because the number of users affected by the virus and the after-effects is still in the grapevine.

According to Doctor Web Security researchers, a Russian anti-virus company, these 60 plus septic games that were uploaded on Google Play in names of more than 30 leading Games Developers which includes Conexagon Studio, Fun Colour Games and BILLAPPS.

This isn't the first time Google has fallen short of preventing similar mishaps, Ghost push malware, which so far has affected 9,00,000 android users. In India, the number is 1,50,000. While globally Samsung suffered most, in India Micromax had around 55,444 devices being infected. This is followed by 19,984 HTC and 9,905 Samsung devices. Altogether, Ghost Push has infected 10,000 phone types and 2,742 brands.

Clean Master and CM Security have developed a mechanism to deal with the virus called the Ghost Push Trojan Killer. With a new trojan virus attacking our android apps every day, our best bet is to avoid getting it in the first place. Beware!