Creepy Android malware jumps from your phone to your PC

NBC News, Suzanne Choney

A new and frightening form of Android malware travels from the phone to a PC, where it can then open files on a computer, as well as collect information from contacts and gather photos among other invasive actions.

"We have come across PC malware that infects mobile devices before. However, in this case it's the other way round: an app that runs on a mobile device (a smartphone) is designed to infect PCs," writes Victor Chebyshev, Kaspersky Lab expert, on the company's Securelistblog.

Two Android apps, Superclean and "a twin brother," DroidCleaner, bill themselves as apps that can free up memory on phones, in turn helping them to run faster. They don't do that at all. Instead, once a user syncs his or her phone with a PC, say to update a music playlist, or for any reason, the malware is installed on the PC, and can infect workstations, Chebyshev says.

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