Hackers Target Tibetan Activists With Android Trojan Virus

Source: Mashable

If you are a Tibetan or Uyghur activist, you may want to be careful opening the next email you get about a human rights conference. Sure, they normally look innocuous, but there's a chance it will contain a trojan virus that will infect and end up stealing a trove of information from your Android phone.

Researchers at Kaspersky Labs have uncovered a new type of malware designed to target Tibetan and Uyghur activists, the company announced in a blog post on Tuesday. The malware, specifically tailored for Android phones, is a trojan virus, sent as an attachment in an email referencing the recent World Uyghur Conference (WUC), where human rights activists from Tibet, China, East Turkestan and Mongolia gathered.

According to Kaspersky researchers, this is the first documented attack that targets Android smartphones. In the past, cyber attacks against these groups of activists focused on infecting Windows or Macs computers.

"This is the first time a precisely targeted attack is implementing an Android-based Trojan," Kurt Baumgartner, a senior security researcher at Kaspersky told Mashable in an email. Although Android malware is "nothing new," Baumgartner said "this is the first instance that it was used in a targeted attack that’s publicly documented."

Read more: http://mashable.com/2013/03/26/hackers-target-tibetan-activist-android-trojan