Potentially Unwanted Program – that’s what PUP stands for. You probably already had a chance to meet some PUPs on a Windows PC, but how does a PUP look on an Android phone? How will you know how to handle it?  All of this will be explained here.

When a PUP alert attacks you, don’t panic.

For starters, it’s just a warning. It’s not a standard virus and, no, your life is not in danger. PUP detections were made to warn people when a suspicious component or ability is detected within the application.

Let’s say you downloaded an app that’s called “Christmas Carols” (don’t panic about that, either; it’s still a month and a half till Christmas) and a PUP warning hits you. The detection name reads “Android:SpyPhone-E [PUP]”. What should you do? Well, what I would do is to sing Silent Night to that app and wave goodbye while uninstalling it. Why? Well, it’s an app that’s supposed to play Christmas carols and not “SpyMyPhone” or whatever that PUP warning says.

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Android is one of the fastest growing platforms in the world. In the second quarter of this year there were more than 300 million active Android devices. The increase is almost 900,000 of new devices per day and still rising. These days Android occupies more than 60% of the mobile devices market!  By the way there is around 300,000 newborn children a day all around the world, and this number constantly decreases.

Hand in hand with this trend goes the rise of applications and viruses for this platform. In the past week we noticed one of them that was especially tricky. At first look, it’s trying to act like a regular Google Play application, but that’s just an illusion. It is a fake application which not only downloads other fraudulent application, but it is also able to send premium text messages without user’s knowledge

After the installation it replaces the original Google Play from the menu and just waits for a first start from the user.

Immediately after the first start you are asked to update the program and there your troubles continue “Critical update, install new version, click the continue”.

After this step follows another nasty download from this link shows up:

After the installation of second aplication, your phone turns into a money sucking machine. Without your knowledge it starts sending premium messages on paid numbers. Luckily we caught this threat and Avast! detects both samples as Android:OpFake-BV.

This file is  easily accessible from more than thirty malware pages, which are made to resemble various markets and download pages! But no worries Avast! users are protected even if you accidentally visit these pages.

SHA:

8CA2E64E008BA4FC667809D4DD9FA2CE98F8AF248F1DE7B280636555EF09EF40

DCE5A75092996B4388644B1E56A0F07FCB05F4C069E14AE269075EC2A33DA3FF

Last week we told you in the avast! blog about the nasty attack against Android smartphones which could lock the SIM cards or completely wipe all of the data and reset to factory settings. We are pleased to confirm that the newest update of avast! Free Mobile Security protects against USSD attacks, without having to install additional tools.

“The benefit of our solution is that we do not require the user to install an additional tool, as the newest update of avast! Mobile Security already contains the protection,” said Reinhold Holzner, Managing Director of AVAST Software Austria. “All you need to do is to accept the program update on your smartphone.”

Avast! Free Mobile Security is a full-featured anti-theft and anti-malware app for Android smartphones and devices. With special “stealth” and remote-access features, including lock, wipe and siren, as well as an abundance of remote text commands, smartphone users are protected against the loss or misuse of their device.

Avast! Free Mobile Security is completely free and available through Google play. Protect your devices now, and please tell a friend about it too.

Researchers have determined that an attack which can wipe data from Samsung Android devices when visiting a malicious website can also be used to lock the SIM cards or completely wipe all of the data from many other Android phones. In addition to web pages, the attack can be triggered through SMS, or by a rouge NFC tag or QR code.

Mobile geek Dylan Reeve explains how the attack works.  Computerworld summarizes it like this, “The attack can be launched from a Web page by loading a “tel:” URI (uniform resource identifier) with a special factory reset code inside an iframe. If the page is visited from a vulnerable device, the dialer application automatically executes the code and performs a factory reset.”

Check if your smartphone is vulnerable

Here is a way for you to check if your phone is vulnerable to this remote wipe threat: Visit http://dylanreeve.com/phone.php on your Android device, and if your phone is vulnerable, you’ll immediately see your phone’s IMEI number pop up. I checked my HTC Google Nexus One this way, and it came back as being vulnerable. Other phones reported to be affected include the HTC One X, Motorola Defy, Sony Experia Active, Sony Xperia Arc S, and the HTC Desire. Reeve says that Samsung fixed the USSD/MMI code execution issue for Galaxy S III devices, but it appears that all 4.1-based builds are safe, and some 4.0.4 builds as well.

Currently avast! Mobile Security is actively blocking URLs containing malicious code that triggers the exploit. Our Android users can expect an update containing protection against this kind of attack soon. We’ll let you know when that is released.

Edit: We are pleased to confirm that the newest update of avast! Free Mobile Security protects against USSD attacks, without installing additional tools. All you need to do is to accept the program update offered by avast! on your smartphone. Please share this message with your friends who are Android smartphone owners. They might need avast! Mobile Security too. Thank you.

Question of the week: How do I access My avast! account, and what can I do there?

The My avast! account was created so you can manage all your avast! software and services from one area. You can enter your account by clicking on the avast! icon in the system tray in the bottom right corner of your computer. This opens the avast! user interface. In the Summary section of the UI, you can see if the device you are using is connected to your My avast! account.  To the right of that is a link to connect,  https://my.avast.com. Click this link to log in and connect the device to your account.

Once you are there, you can see all your avast! protected devices in one place. This is quite useful if you have multiple devices like a PC, tablet and mobile phone. The section called Security Info gives you a summary of protection for each device. If your avast! Antivirus license is expiring soon, it will remind you and give you the opportunity to renew.

For those of you with Android phones, your My avast! account provides valuable information related to avast! Anti-Theft. You can change the settings, for example, add a friend’s number to communicate with your phone if it gets stolen, remotely wipe or lock the phone or stealthily send SMS commands. The Locator Map finds the position of the phone, so you can track it.

Check out your My avast! account here, https://my.avast.com.

A Google alert just popped up this review from Android Authority titled:  “The best just got better“. And I just love the writeup from the author Simon Hill…

“After trying a number of Android security apps and comparing their performance in independent tests it is easy to recommend Avast Mobile Security as your best option. The sheer variety of features is more in keeping with a premium app, but it is still completely free.”

So if you have an Android phone – and according to the latest data by Gartner there should be about 450 million of you out there – go to Google Play and get the best rated security app.  For free.

I’m still having my old Nokia but I guess time has come to get the shiny Galaxy S3 and install as well 

Eight months after the wildly popular release of avast! Free Mobile Security, we are pleased to launch avast! Mobile Security 2.0 for Android smartphones and tablets.  Adding to its already feature-rich anti-malware and anti-theft capabilities, the latest version of avast! Mobile Security 2.0 is sure to be the best free security solution for Android on the market.  You can download it from the Google Play store.

“The free-but-full-featured Android antivirus and anti-theft app has become the highest-rated security solution on Google Play store with a score of 4.7 stars,” said Ondřej Vlček, CTO of AVAST Software. “We protect over 8 million active devices now and we are growing by 1 million active devices per month,” added Vlček.

avast! Mobile Security 2.0 uses the same award-winning antivirus engine as avast! Antivirus products for PC and Mac and is constantly updated with a mobile version of our virus database and latest virus definitions. avast! Mobile Security 2.0 seamlessly integrates the most stealthy anti-theft component in the marketplace: Immediately upon detecting a threat, avast! Anti-Theft jumps into action without alerting thieves to its presence.

avast! Mobile Security 2.0 includes the following new features:

• Remote functions through the web portal - allows you to remotely control your avast!-equipped device(s) from the web. The web portal offers full control of the device to remotely locate, lock, or wipe your lost phone, sound an alarm, SMS and call forwarding, and a lot more. Access the interface on my.avast.com.
• Improved tablet support – with the popularity of Android tablets such as Amazon’s Kindle Fire and the Samsung Galaxy Tab, AVAST has worked to provide better compatibility with these devices, along with delivering a specific user interface tailored for the larger tablet devices.
• Network meter – review your data usage consumed by each app, individually for WiFi, 3G, or roaming networks.
• avast! Widget – from your device screen, the avast! Widget provides you a quick view of your overall security status, and the ability with one tap to access the main avast! Free Mobile Security interface, to run a malware scan of your installed apps, or bring up a dashboard of device health information such as CPU usage, memory usage, and SD Card free space.
• SiteCorrect™ – in a new feature unique to AVAST, our web protection will now detect common URL typing mistakes and can redirect you to the site you intended to visit.
• Custom name for Anti-Theft – this name is used to disguise the app from thieves’ eyes (e.g. label it “Dodo Gadget”)
• Real-time protection of apps – scan installed applications on their first execution

“We’ve now made the avast! Mobile Security product even better, and continue to keep the solution totally free,” commented Vince Steckler, CEO of AVAST Software.

Got a brand new smartphone and want to be protected from all the dangerous malware that’s out there? So you go and get some Android antivirus software. But, what you don’t know is that you just got tricked. And, it’s going to cost you some money. Yes, even if you downloaded if for free.

The latest trend in Android malware is to hide behind something that seems to be legit. Guys at GFI Labs pointed that out, so let’s take a closer look behind the scenes and add some interesting info from the AVAST Virus Lab’s perspective. Imagine yourself as a virus maker. You create an app that will do something evil like steal or delete people’s texts (you’re a nice virus maker), or you want to milk the cow even more and you create an app that’s going to get you some money from the victim by making it silently send text messages to premium-rate phone numbers.

But, how do you spread your evil milking machine among Android users? Just take a look at the apps that are already popular and trusted, like Angry Birds, Opera Browser, or even better, an antivirus app! What can feel safer than installing antivirus on your phone, right? So you take your evil app and make it look, for example, like avast! Mobile Security or any other antivirus suite. Then you make it available for free download, easy to find, placed on a web page that is not guarded like the Play Store, Amazon App Store, or any other genuine Android market. Most of the people only download apps from these genuine stores, but there are always some of them that somehow get tricked or that are just unlucky and run into some fraudulent apps like the one I’m talking about.

Let’s take a closer look at one of the cases. Android:FakeInst-AB Read more…

How many times have you dropped your mobile phone? As much as I try to take good care of my phone, I can count at least 3 times that it has slipped out of my hand and landed with a sickening crunch on the pavement by my feet. Thankfully, my Nexus 1 (it’s ancient, I know) seems to handle the abuse, and except for some external bruises, it works fine. But that’s not always the case.  One of our Facebook fans wrote this testimonial today on our wall.

Thank you!

I had an issue on the weekend with my phone and Avast has saved the day!!!

I had dropped my new Galaxy SII HD LTE and was unable to view or alter the phone due to a broken screen. My replacement is on the way but I wanted to ensure my phone was wiped and factory reset before I sent it back to Bell.

Without Avast Mobile on the phone this would have been impossible, so I would just like to say THANK YOU! One quick text and the phone was wiped and factory reset.

You have secured the integrity of my data and assisted when I needed it most. THANK YOU a Million times over.

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