Microsoft experts found the first botnet from Android devices

The first botnet was discovered from mobile devices using the Google Android operating system. About this, according to Associated Press, said the employee of the Microsoft division for Terry Zinc on the MSDN Blogs . Botnet, according to zinc, is engaged in the newsletter of spam.

After analyzing the IP addresses, from which the messages were sent, Zinc came to the conclusion that the hackers “hacked” smartphones in Chile, Indonesia, Lebanon, Oman, in the Philippines, in Russia, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Venezuela and Ukraine, BBC British broadcasting corporation said.

Google, which develops and supports Android, said that it does not comment on requests related to the safety of specific applications, but at the same time constantly improves the security of the platform as a whole. Android today is the most popular mobile platform in the world.

Microsoft, for which zinc works, has its own operating system for mobile devices - Windows Phone, and it competes in the Android market.

Botnet, recall, is called a network consisting of hosts with "bots" launched on them (reduction from the word "robot") - autonomous software. Most often, the bot in the batch network is a program secretly installed on the victim’s computer and allows the attacker to perform certain actions using the resources of the infected computer.

Botnets are used for various kinds of illegal or undesirable activities: spam mailing, passwords for passwords on a remote system, attacks on refusal to maintain (DDOS), etc. Botnets attacks are able to disable not only large Internet resources, but also entire network segments.

At the same time, it was still invariably about stationary computers or laptops: cases of use to create smartphone botnets were not known, although experts have long warned that this was quite possible with the spread of mobile devices.

“There were rumors that it was possible,” Terry Zinc wrote on the blog on the MSDN Blogs website. “But for the first time I saw it with my own eyes: Spammer controls the bot -network living on Android devices.”

At the disposal of the Microsoft expert were spam messages from hacking postal addresses registered on the Yahoo Internet portal. Judging by the digital signature of letters, they were all sent from mobile devices on the Android platform.