Google removes 300 Android apps that secretly hijacked phones for DDoS attacks
Around 300 apps have been withdrawn from Google’s Play Store after they were found to be secretly hijacking Android devices to supply traffic for wide-scale distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, as noted by Gizmodo. Google removed apps that offered services like ringtones and storage managers after security researchers uncovered the “WireX” botnet was behind the ploy. Malware was hidden inside the affected apps, and as long as the device remained switched on it was used in DDoS attacks.
Researchers at cloud services provider Akamai discovered WireX after a hospitality company suffered from a DDoS attack involving hundreds of thousands of IP addresses. DDoS attacks work by overwhelming a target with large amounts of data from…
