Android Application on Solar Charging Steals Information

Most smartphone users know that battery life is a perennial problem. The high processing power of embedded CPUs and large, bright LCD screens, coupled with frequent usage, means a lot of juice is required to keep the show going throughout the day. This has spawned a whole genre of applications aimed at addressing this problem. There are some applications that will offer status updates on battery life and notify users when your battery is getting low, but breaking through the boundaries of credibility are a bunch of applications that will supposedly turn the phone screen into a solar charger.

Malware developers too have caught on and are taking advantage of smartphone users’ constant need for power by creating malicious apps to steal confidential information. In the September 2012 edition of the Symantec Intelligence Report, an Android application we’ve detected – Android.Sumzand – claims to convert the smartphone screen into a solar panel that can charge the battery. Android devices do not contain solar panels—a critical component needed to turn light into electricity. Naturally the application can do nothing of the sort. Instead, what the app really does is steal contact data from the phone.

Fake solar charger in Android.Sumzand

Until real solar panels are actually installed on phones, Symantec advises that it’s best to just continue charging your phone the old-fashioned way: plugging it in to a wall socked or USB port. Besides that, be careful what you download and install from application marketplaces. If an application requests permissions that seem out of the ordinary for what it is supposed to do, then don’t install it.

In addition, as more SMBs in Malaysia adopt mobility in the workplace to encourage productivity, the growth of these mobile connections becomes a mounting challenge to secure owing to the increasingly sophisticated and tricky threat landscape. Symantec advises users to be careful when downloading or installing apps from application marketplaces.