Researcher demos threat of ‘transparent’ smartphone botnets

December 7, 2011

In a presentation at TakeDownCon in Las Vegas, security researcher Georgia Weidman demonstrated how malware on smartphones could be used to create smartphone “botnets” that could be used in the same way as PC botnets, providing hackers with a way to insert code between the operating system’s security layers and the cell network, Ars Technica reports.

Weidman said that the approaches used by Carrier IQ developers to create phone monitoring software could be adopted by hackers as well to create botnets that could silently steal users’ data, or send data without users’ knowledge. “From what I’ve seen in Carrier IQ, they just didn’t think about what they were going to do,” Weidman said. “But malware writers are going to take advantage of those techniques.”