Pietro wrote a nice post about him finding Android malware while visiting the theatre. Thanks to Thug (thank you Angelo) and HoneyProxy, he was able to get some interesting details about their infrastructure. I was curious what kind of malware you find in a theatre, so I quickly looked at one of the samples that he mentioned: f6ad9ced69913916038f5bb94433848d.

Virus Total already provides some nice information for Android.

The SEND_SMS permissions already gives a solid hint that this application is probably sending to premium numbers. But why would the app also need RECEIVE_SMS permissions. That sparked my interest to take it apart completely. So I dug out dex2jar and jad and decompiled it. Yes, I know, there are better tools out there, but I’m old (school). I even use Emacs for browsing the decompiled code ;) For those who like to have other tools mentioned, I’ll put some at the end of the post (please send me suggestions if you have more worth mentioning).

Some nights ago I was heading to a local theater with some (non-nerd) friends. We did not recall very well the address, so I brought out my phone (LG Nexus 4 with Android 4.4.2 and Google Chrome) and googled for it. I found the theater’s official site and started looking for the contact info, when Chrome suddenly opened a popup window pointing me to a Russian web site (novostivkontakte.ru) urging me to update my Flash Player. I laughed loudly and showed them to my (again, totally non-nerd) friends saying that the site had been owned. One of them went on and opened the site with her own phone (Samsung Galaxy S Advance with Android 4.4.1 and the default Android WebKit browser). To make a long story short, after a few instants her phone was downloading a file without even asking her for confirmation. So: Chrome on my Nexus 4 was using social engineering to have me click on a link and manually download the file; Android’s WebKit on her Galaxy S Advance was instead downloading the file straight away: interesting! However, we were a bit late and we had to run for the comedy, so I did not even bother to see what the heck she had downloaded, I only made sure she hadn’t opened it. I thought it was just the usual exploit kit trying to infect PCs by serving fake Flash Player updates, seen tons of those. While waiting for the comedy to begin, I quickly submitted the compromised site to three different services, the first three ones that came to my mind: HoneyProxy Client, Wepawet and Unmask Parasites, then turned off my phone and enjoyed the show.

As the deadline of GSOC has passed, I would like to announce the APKinspector Beta1.0. APKinspector is a tool to help Android application analysts and reverse engineers to analyze the compiled Android packages and their corresponding codes. You can review the Alpha version report and the page of this project to know more about it.

Click the picture below to watch a full demonstration video of APKInspector:

Chinese viewers may view the demo at: http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMjk3ODAwMzU2.html