Beijing Police Arrested Alleged Creators of WireLurker Malware

PCWorld.com reported on 14th November, 2014 stating that Beijing Police have arrested three people suspected to be developing the "WireLurker' malware which might have infected hundreds of thousands of Apple users.

Internet security team of Beijing police observed that local authorities arrested three suspects on a tip from Chinese security company Qihoo 360 Technology.

The police said in a post on its official account of Sino Weibo, a Chinese microblogging website that three suspects with surnames Wang, Li and Chen were detained on Thursday, 13th November, 2014 and charged for creating and spreading malware but police did not publish the full names of the suspects.

The police added that suspects had conspired to create WireLurker to gain illegal profits and used a Chinese third-party application store known as Maiyadi to spread the malware and the Maiyati site has also been shut down.

Initially, researchers of Palo Alto discovered only iOS and OS X versions of WireLurker and Jaime Blasco, security researcher of AlienVault, also identified a Windows version of the threat which is less effective.

Securityweek.com published a report on 17th November, 2014 quoting Mark Parker, Senior Product Manager of iSheriff, a specialist vendor in Internet cloud-based security, as saying "WireLurker introduces a new threat vector in a place which seemed to be secure. The concept of downloading new threats by using Trojan software is not new and in fact it has been in practice for many years. However, till this point, the software on iOS devices has been considered secure as it is the only software on the device which would come through heavily examined Apple App Store."

The protection afforded by the App Store is leap frogged in an effective manner by using the USB connection of workstation as an avenue to secretly install Trojan applications. It is certain that it would be more advanced and copycats because of its success.

Users can keep themselves secured from such malware attacks in future by downloading their apps from trusted sources. Most of these malwares have one thing common which is their presence in third-party app stores where scrutiny might be minimum.

» SPAMfighter News - 11/24/2014