Admit it or not but some of you out there have secretly hoped for a Zombie apocalypse. Maybe you just fancy a break from the normal daily routine, or perhaps the idea of living in constant fear floats your boat, or perhaps you just want the chance at hacking your bosses head off! Whatever their reasons some people have at least fantasized about the idea. But did you know that a ‘Zombie’ is currently running rampant and had claimed 1 million victims in the first week of September alone? In the first week of September this year 1 million cell
phones were infected by what experts are calling an aggressive ‘Zombie’ like .
According to CCTV where complaints were made over higher than expected
phone bills, the
malware is often accidentally downloaded attached to legitimate
applications. Once installed on the
phone it lies dormant until mid-night at which time it sends
SMS messages to any contact on your SIM card. The messages recommend games with
download links, if someone receiving the message clicks a link the
virus infects that
phone and the process starts again.
A
phone with the ‘Zombie’
virus won’t only be a
carrier, but will also incur high
phone charges due to the number of messages sent plus the bandwidth used to
download the infected
software.
Experts monitoring the
virus claim that a distributor purposely infecting their
applications stand to make 10 times more profit and 1 million infected phones could cost users more than 2 million yuan ($300,000) every day!
More than 1600 different
virus which attack mobile devices were detected in the first half of this year, a number which is expected to increase with the growing number of
phone users.