By Carl Bagh: Subscribe to Carl's RSS feed
July 30, 2010 12:22 PM EDT
Google's Android users have come under attack from downloaded applications after a popular application Jackeey Wallpaper harvested phone SIM card numbers and subscriber information and sent it to a website based in China.
The Jackeey application offers popular wallpapers such as My Little Pony and Star Wars. The particular website in question www.imnet.us is located in Shenzhen, China. IMNET primarily gets data from other internet sources and repackages it as a proprietary product and gives it as free application to Android users. It is reported that millions have downloaded the wallpapers.
The application does vaguely warn users that it may collect phone information but most of the customers tend to overlook the message. Android does have warning messages associated to its approved application while iPhone gives a manual option to disable applications prowess to access phone data.
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The particular flaw was reported as mobile security firm called Lookout at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, that has monitored over 100,000 Apple and Android apps, has reported that 47 percent of Android and 23 percent of iPhone apps accumulate some form of customer data.
The problem complicates as keeping a tab on application developers for the open source Android platform becomes quite difficult compared to the proprietary structure of Apple.
Apple follows a strict acceptance procedure for applications built for iPhones and thus scrutiny becomes easier.
The present report follows a similar attack whereby hackers hijacked a number of Apple iTunes accounts and purchased a particular application charging $40 to $600 to the customer's account.
The current application based on hacking also gains significance for iPhone customers post-relaxation of jailbreaking laws. Since customers who get their iPhones OS reconfigured to download certain applications also become susceptible to these attacks, not to mention the fact that such phones are not covered by iPhone warranty.
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