Newest Android Trojan Could Earn Hackers $500,000 per Day

Hummer, the most recent Trojan developed for Android, has infected 1.4 million mobile phones daily in China alone in six months. Considering its high infection rate, the Trojan could earn its Chinese authors at least $500,000 in a single day, researchers say.

Security researchers have analyzed various samples and concluded that, in the past six months, the authors of Hummer have used as many as 12 domains to promote the infected apps. All domains have been linked to a single email address in China.

“Researchers believe that this Trojan family originated from the underground internet industry chain in China, based on the Trojan codes that have been uploaded to an open-source platform by a careless member of the criminal group behind the Trojan family” Cheetah Mobile said in a blog post.

Once the smartphone is infected, the Trojan will configure the device for administrator privileges and then will pop up ads and install malware and pornographic applications to use up network traffic. Hummer is hard to remove from infected device due to the administrator privilege setting. As a result, neither a software security solution nor a factory reset can clean the device.

Up to this point, Hummer has infected millions of smartphones worldwide, ranking it the most virulent member of the Android Trojan family. Some of the most frequently targeted countries are India, Indonesia, Turkey and China.