The app, called "Weather Forecast-World Weather Accurate Radar", was not only pre-installed on Alcatel mobile phones, but was also available on the Google Play Store.
ΣAccording to a report by Upstream, a Smartphone security company, a weather app installed on some Alcatel smartphones contained malware, and without the knowledge of the owners of these devices, made calls to high-charge numbers.
The app, called "Weather Forecast-World Weather Accurate Radar", was not only pre-installed on Alcatel mobile phones, but was also available on the Google Play Store, and more than 10 million people installed the app on their Android device.
The most interesting part of this story is that, the application was developed by the Chinese phone manufacturer TCL. Yes, it is TCL itself that makes handheld devices for Alcatel, BlackBerry and Palm.
This malware was discovered when Upstream found a series of transaction attempts, which were blocked by the security platform, and started from mobile phones Alcatel Pixi 4 and A3 Max. These transactions involved subscriptions to high-end telephone numbers in Brazil and Malaysia.
Upstream reports that the security platform Secure-D has blocked 27 million subscription attempts made by TCL weather application. The company says if it had not blocked these requests, consumers would have paid $ 1,5 million in bogus charges to their service provider. In addition, the application also collected information such as, unique IMEI phone number, email addresses and geographical locations, and sent it to a server in China.
Eventually, the Wall Street Journal published this whole story about the app, and together with Upstream, they contacted TCL and Google. The application has now been removed from TCL and the Google Play Store.
All of these stories are exactly why the US government is worried about smartphones and networking equipment coming from some China-based manufacturers.
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