14 DAY TRIAL // Researchers from the mobile security firm Lookout have identified a security hole in the Yahoo! Mail app for Android, which they believed to be responsible for the so-called mobile spam botnet. Today, Trend Micro experts have confirmed the existence of the flaw.
They couldn’t precisely say if the vulnerability is in fact responsible for the spam sent out from mobile phones, but the fact that they independently appoint the same weakness as a possible cause makes this scenario even more plausible.
The weakness discovered by the researchers allows an attacker to steal a user’s Yahoo! cookies.
“This bug stems from the communication between Yahoo! mail server and Yahoo! Android mail client. By gaining this cookie, the attacker can use the compromised Yahoo! Mail account to send specially-crafted messages. The said bug also enables an attacker to gain access to user’s inbox and messages,” Mobile Threats Analyst Weichao Sun said.
Currently, the fix for the issue is being coordinated with Yahoo! and the researchers promise a more technical analysis, but in the meantime, users must be extra cautious when receiving shady pharmacy advertisements that appear to be sent from Android devices via Yahoo! Mail.
The pieces of this puzzle appear to be falling into place and all signs indicate that this may not be a botnet after all, just like Google representatives said when the situation came to light.
However, over ten days have passed since Lookout made its findings public and notified Yahoo!. It’s curious that the company still hasn’t rolled out a fix for the vulnerability, especially since it’s clearly being exploited in the wild.
On the other hand, the organization has bigger issues on its plate since hackers from D33Ds Company leaked 450,000 email addresses and associated passwords from a Contributor Network database.