Tag Archives: iOS

Seen Ad Pop-up’s in Your Mobile Browser Lately?

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by Armando Orozco

Today, one of our Webroot SecureAnywhere for Android users reported seeing ad redirections while browsing on his Android device. As we began investigating, we noticed that there were a lot of other mobile users seeing the same thing – yes, on their iPhones as well! We were also able to reproduce the behavior on our devices.

This appears to be a clever Ad redirection using JavaScript. The pop-ups are survey offers for free electronics like iPads and iPhones. The users are asked to complete a survey, at the end of which their email address and phone number is also recorded. I know we’ve all seen these pop-ups before, but we’re not used to seeing them in our mobile world.

These pop-ups are not related to any apps you may have installed – they are a result of how the web page was written. Web developers use “alert()” function in JavaScript, which displays a message box requesting response from a user. The advertisers utilize this method to display their ads.

We are still investigating this issue and hope to track down the advertisers responsible. There does not appear to be anything malicious about these pop-ups for the time being, but we are sure malware authors will employ this tactic soon. With the rash of Rogue Applications and the recent discovery of a Rogue AV app (blog coming soon), we can see how this method could be exploited with malicious intent. Again, these are not platform or application-specific behaviors.

To remedy these pop-ups, you can disable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thanks to JohnDeth of our Webroot Community for bringing this to our attention.

Report: 3,325% increase in malware targeting the Android OS

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By Dancho Danchev

Which is the most targeted mobile operating system?

According to the recently released 2011 Mobile Threats Report from our partners at Juniper Networks, that’s the Android OS.

Key summary points from the report:

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Reflections on mobile security

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By Armando Orozco

Be wary the next time you enter your passcode into your iPhone on the bus – someone could be shoulder surfing. In fact, a team of researchers from the University of North Carolina has developed a system to watch you pecking out characters on your phone, analyse the video, and produce a pretty accurate guess of what you were typing.

When people talk about key loggers, they’re usually thinking about malware that sits on a computer and surreptitiously monitors what keys people are pressing. But these university researchers are applying an entirely different approach to key logging. Instead of putting software on computers, they are investigating ways to monitor the text that people input into their mobile phones. They do it by taking video of your phone, either directly (over your shoulder or from the side), or simply by reading the reflections of your phone’s screen in your glasses.

The researchers developed a mechanism for looking at mobile phone screens using cheap, mobile videocameras. The cameras record video of people typing on ‘soft’ keyboards, such as those used by Apple’s iPhone. These keyboards commonly use ‘pop out’ animations, in which the key being pressed gets bigger when pressed, to confirm to the user that they have selected the right letter. The pop-out animation makes it easier to see which keys are being pressed in the video.

Mobile cameras have increased dramatically in quality lately, making them far more capable of capturing reflected keyboard images. These cameras are embedded in smartphones, of course, or if you wanted to get even techier, you could buy one of these.

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