The anti-spam engineer at Microsoft, Terry Zink, made a disturbing discovery last Tuesday. Analyzing samples of spam, the officer noticed a large amount of junk mail coming from servers of Yahoo Mail. All e-mails have the signature "Sent from Yahoo! Mail on Android," possibly indicating the presence of an international network of infected cell spamming on a large scale.
"All these messages are sent from Android devices. We've all heard the rumors, but this is the first time I saw it - a spammer who controls a botnet that lives in Android devices. These devices come in user account on Yahoo Mail and send spam, "said Zink.
We do not know exactly how these users are infected, but the engineer found common features in the header of the email: most of the junk comes from developing countries, including Chile, Indonesia, Lebanon, Oman, Philippines, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Ukraine and Venezuela.
The Microsoft employee finds it difficult for someone to be infected by just installing applications Play Store, but believes in the possibility of users have downloaded a malicious application in order to avoid paying a legalized version. "Either that or they installed some malicious application from Yahoo Mail," he said.
"All these messages are sent from Android devices. We've all heard the rumors, but this is the first time I saw it - a spammer who controls a botnet that lives in Android devices. These devices come in user account on Yahoo Mail and send spam, "said Zink.
We do not know exactly how these users are infected, but the engineer found common features in the header of the email: most of the junk comes from developing countries, including Chile, Indonesia, Lebanon, Oman, Philippines, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Ukraine and Venezuela.
The Microsoft employee finds it difficult for someone to be infected by just installing applications Play Store, but believes in the possibility of users have downloaded a malicious application in order to avoid paying a legalized version. "Either that or they installed some malicious application from Yahoo Mail," he said.
