Paper: a timeline of mobile botnets

Posted by   Virus Bulletin on   Mar 30, 2015

Ruchna Nigam provides an overview of more than 60 mobile malware families.

The rise of mobile malware is still a relatively recent thing, with the first actual mobile botnets not appearing until the beginning of this decade.

However, since then things have changed quickly, and today there are more than one million known mobile malware samples (though not families) in existence and mobile malware is almost as common as malware targeting desktops (even if there are some fundamental differences between the two).

Today, we publish a paper by Fortinet researcher Ruchna Nigam, in which she presents a timeline of mobile botnets.

Not only does Ruchna list more than 60 mobile botnets (including well-known names such as Zitmo, NotCompatible, Xsser and DroidKungFu) and provide basic information on all of them, she also takes a closer look at some particularly interesting variants.

  Location-grabbing functionality in Android/SmsHowU, discovered in September 2010.

Moreover, in her paper Ruchna takes a look at how mobile malware, not unlike malware targeting desktop operating systems, uses anti-debugging tricks, code obfuscation and traffic encryption.

She finishes her paper by providing some statistics on mobile botnets, including the C&C channel used, the motivation behind the malware and the kinds of certificates used to sign the APK files.

You can read the paper here in HTML format or here as a PDF. (Remember that all content published by Virus Bulletin can be read free of charge, with no registration required.)

Ruchna's paper was originally presented at and published by Botconf 2014 and was republished with permission. My review of the 2014 edition of Botconf can be found here. The call for papers for its third edition, which will take place 2-4 December in Paris, France, can be found here.



Posted on 30 March 2015 by Martijn Grooten
twitter.png
fb.png
linkedin.png
hackernews.png
reddit.png

 

Latest posts:

VBSpam tests to be executed under the AMTSO framework

VB is excited to announce that, starting from the Q3 test, all VBSpam tests of email security products will be executed under the AMTSO framework.

In memoriam: Prof. Ross Anderson

We were very sorry to learn of the passing of Professor Ross Anderson a few days ago.

In memoriam: Dr Alan Solomon

We were very sorry to learn of the passing of industry pioneer Dr Alan Solomon earlier this week.

New paper: Nexus Android banking botnet – compromising C&C panels and dissecting mobile AppInjects

In a new paper, researchers Aditya K Sood and Rohit Bansal provide details of a security vulnerability in the Nexus Android botnet C&C panel that was exploited in order to gather threat intelligence, and present a model of mobile AppInjects.

New paper: Collector-stealer: a Russian origin credential and information extractor

In a new paper, F5 researchers Aditya K Sood and Rohit Chaturvedi present a 360 analysis of Collector-stealer, a Russian-origin credential and information extractor.

We have placed cookies on your device in order to improve the functionality of this site, as outlined in our cookies policy. However, you may delete and block all cookies from this site and your use of the site will be unaffected. By continuing to browse this site, you are agreeing to Virus Bulletin's use of data as outlined in our privacy policy.