There is a famous saying in the industry that nothing comes for free in this world and while we are not getting anything for free, there are still cheap products out there. Now, there is a reason why people like to buy cheap products and we can take smartphones for example. It is that the cheap smartphones do the job that they are meant to do while they can be replaced easily while a costlier phone has to be used longer. Also, the resell value of costly phone will be less compared to the cheap phone.
But there is a major problem with cheap smartphones which is of privacy and security. Most of the cheap smartphones in the market are Chinese and they have a tendency to get pre-installed malware apps on them which are dangerous. We have seen this problem in countries like India where malware is found on most budget Chinese phones and now the same is taking place in the US. According to the research, it has been found that most of the budget phones in US have pre-installed malware.
Now, this malware will be disguised in apps such as RAM cleaner, cache cleaner, adware or browser which might not look suspicious but they do send information servers that can be traced back. A new pre-installed malware has been found on budget handset connected to Assurance Wireless by Virgin Mobile as per the report. This malware was discovered as early as in January this year by Malwarebytes. The toughest part was that this malware was non-removable even if the user knew the risk and wanted to uninstall it. The latest malware has been found by researchers on a phone named ANS (American Network Solutions) UL40, running Android OS 7.1.1. In the phone, the Settings app itself is identified as trojan named Downloader Wotby.
