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20 Million Gionee Smartphones Contain Malware !
This malware can allow remote access to these smartphones ...
Article By Betallion44
December 9, 2020, 10:12 am
The Chinese smartphones made by Gionee contained malware. The investigations revealed that there were at least four Chinese nationals responsible for this. They were sentenced to prison last week.
These four persons were Xu Li, Zha Ying, Pan Qi, and Jia Zhengqiang. One of them was a deputy general manager, two were software engineers and one was a legal representative of one of Gionee’s subsidiaries named as Shenzhen Zhipu Technology.
A powerful SDK (Software development Kit) was created and later installed on these smartphones, which had the capability to control remotely the smartphones after they were in their customers hand.
The malware was pushed to these smartphones by Shenzhen Zhipu Technology via an update which was related to a lock-screen application.
This malware was used to push ads to users smartphones. The revenue from these ads was around 4.26 Million US Dollars. It is estimated that around 20 million smartphone units suffer from this malware.
The question has to be asked, how did the authorities catch this scheme? This comes down to a bug. The user’s smartphone screen was blocked due to a bug in the malware. The parent company staff looked at the issue and found out the unauthorized malware installed via a lock-screen application. This investigation led to the official complaint to the authorities from the parent company.
The four persons involved in this scheme were arrested in November 2020. These suspected individuals have accepted the crime, and pleaded guilty to potentially achieve a reduced prison sentence.
Each suspected person is sentenced to around 3 to 3.5 years in prison along with a hefty penalty of $30,500 which is around 200,000 Chinese Yuan.
If you have bought a Gionee smartphone in the past 12 months, there is a very high chance that your smartphone has this malware. But, you can easily get it rectified by visiting the customer service, so that fresh software can be flashed onto the device to get rid of the malware.
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