There’s one more reason to beware now of your privacy being breached by your phone, as ZScaler warns about the Android app that will blackmail you for quite a decent sum of money in exchange for keeping your information safe.
They say that our lives would change drastically if people had access to every thought going through our head. But what about getting access to everything on our phone? Some might be willing to pay up the ransom in order to make sure everything on their device will remain intact and only for themselves to know.
The Adult Player app, however, is the ransomware that threatens that particular part of your privacy that might not necessary be incriminating, but it’s still not to be shared with everyone. For those not in the know, ‘ransomware’ are malicious apps downloaded on your phone that ask for money in exchange for keeping the information on your device safe.
According to Suelette Dreyfus from the University of Melbourne, it has been a growing domain since it first started infecting phones everywhere around ten years ago. Apparently, ransomware netting reached around $100 million per year, that has been wildly popular among desktop devices, but they’re now pulling their tricks on phones.
Raj Samani from Intel Security has stated that these types of applications have grown in popularity because they’re very easy to make, but it apparently earns around $75,000 every ten weeks for their developers. So, if it makes anyone feel better, they’re not just doing it for the simple display of cunning and malice.
The Adult Player is one particular example that is downloaded directly from the company’s website with the promise that it will provide its user with free pornography. Instead though, the app will appeal to your sense of shame and natural need for keeping everything in your phone private.
Once installed, the app unknowingly takes picture of the user with the front camera, blocks your phone, threatens to delete all your data along with sending it to everyone in your contact list. It goes even a bit further by pretending they’re affiliated with the FBI, accessing your detailed information to make sure you’re aware that ‘they know who you are’.
The price to stop it set at $500 sent through you PayPal account and it would all be back to normal. But that might very well be a deceit too. Since you’re not precisely dealing with people of unblemished integrity, there’s no moral principle to stop them from moving forward with their threat anyway or just asking for additional pay.
Users are cautioned to only download apps from the official stores, such as Google Play Store, since they do not feature malicious ransomware (unless you count addictive games that just ask for money when you’re hooked), and can only be found on official websites of the black mailers.
If you have downloaded the app or find yourself suddenly being hustled by your phone, you need to boot your device in safe mode, remove the app’s administration privileges, and then move forward to uninstalling the app.
Image source: forbes.com
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