A new type of malware, Ghost Push has been discovered by Cheetah Mobile, the fourth largest publisher of applications worldwide as per App Annie. Distributed through non-Google app stores, this virus has affected 14,846 types of phone and 3,658 brands.

[Image Source – Cheetah Mobile’s blog]

According to CM Security Research Lab, it’s the most widespread and infectious virus it’s seen to date. So far it’s been affecting 1.3 million devices globally. Currently, India has 1,44,199 devices being affected by this virus and is ranked as No.2 in terms of the amount of devices being affected. The virus is mainly spread through Europe, Russia, the Middle East region, and southern China. Cheetah Mobile has so far discovered 39 apps that contains the virus.

Ghost Push : How it works

Ghost Push installs unwanted applications like ‘Monkey test’ or ‘Times service’ on the device. These applications cannot be removed easily even by doing a factory reset or using normal antivirus software. The malware slows down the system, drains the battery and consumes large amounts of cellular data. Disguised as legitimate applications, Ghost Push can spread itself widely via commercial SDK’s or browser ads.

[Image Source – Cheetah Mobile’s blog]

Ghost Push : How to detect the infection

Clean Master and CM Security can now detect the infection. CM Security Research Lab is also currently developing a toolkit aimed specifically at ‘Ghost Push’ removal, which will keep your phone safe. Get the tool and protect your phone now!

For more information about the virus, please refer to Cheetah Mobile’s blog; Cheetah Mobile also provides step-by-step process on how to remove this malware.

The second quarter of 2015 was wrought with high profile vulnerabilities and hacks. Cyber criminals became more inventive in their attack methods to infiltrate and abuse existing technologies that are often overlooked. India emerged as the top targeted nation by data-stealing malware to hijack business transactions and steal information from small and medium sized businesses.

Each re-purposed existing malware, tool-kits & techniques to target victims from India, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Taiwan and the United States [US], among other countries.

Myla V. Pilao, Director, TrendLabs Marketing Communications, Trend Micro said

In the second quarter, we saw a shift in the threat landscape with cyber criminals becoming more sophisticated and creative, amplifying existing methods of attack, and using them in new ways. The ethereal outlook on the threat of cyber-crime can no longer be held by the general population. This quarter demonstrated that the potential damage caused by cyber attacks extends far beyond a simple software bug to hacks of airplanes, smart cars and television stations.

Coupled with the fact that attack volumes are of the magnitude of hundreds of millions, the threat that cyber criminals pose today is more tangible than it has ever been.

Some of the key numbers from Q2 2015 demonstrate the challenges of today’s threat landscape are:

• Number of malware detections across APAC in Q2 2015: Over 118 million
• Number of spam messages blocked across APAC: Over 396 million
• Hits to malicious URLs from users across APAC: Over 214 million
• Hits to malicious URLs hosted in the APAC region: Over 50 million

Hackers are taking more strategic approaches, refining their approach and targeting more selective victims to improve their infection rates. This is reflected by the exponential increase in the use of several traditional attack methods, including a 50 percent increase in the integration of the Angler exploit kit, a 67 percent growth in overall exploit kit-related threats, and CryptoWall ransom-ware becoming highly targeted, with 79 percent of infections occurring in the U.S.

Additionally, government entities have realized the full impact of cyber attacks during the second quarter with massive data breaches on both the Internal Revenue Service [IRS] in May and the U.S. Office of Personnel Management [OPM] system in June. The OPM data breach was the largest of its kind to date, exposing personally identifiable information of approximately 21 million individuals. Other government agencies were impacted by targeted campaigns using macro malware, new command and control [C&C] servers and the continued use of newly exploited vulnerabilities and 0-days Pawn Storm.

A blog post regarding the report can also be viewed here. For the complete report, please visit this link. 

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