Geinimi Android malware has 'botnet-like' capabilities

CSO, George Hulme

If you've read any number of 2011 security prediction lists, you've no doubt noticed that mobile malware ranked near the top of each. Not that mobile security predictions took much of a crystal ball or stretch of the imagination to make, but the world didn't even have to wait for the clock to strike midnight on Jan. 1 to see them start to come to fruition.

On Dec. 29, mobile security specialists Lookout Mobile Security identified a new Android Trojan named Geinimi, built to lift and transmit personal data from a user's phone and ship it to a remote server. "The most sophisticated Android malware we've seen to date, Geinimi is also the first Android malware in the wild that displays botnet-like capabilities. Once the malware is installed on a user's phone, it has the potential to receive commands from a remote server that allows the owner of that server to control the phone," the company wrote in its blog.

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