Up To 25 Million Android Devices Affected By New Malware Known As “Agent Smith”

According to a report yesterday, Wednesday, July 10, 2019, from Check Point, a trusted cybersecurity company based in Israel, up to 25 million smartphones that use Android as a mobile operating system have been infected with malware that autonomously deletes apps that people use frequently such as WhatsApp and replace them with fake versions that help cybercriminals carry out phishing schemes as a means of drumming up those apps’ users’ login information.

The malware has been called Agent Smith around the cybersecurity world, according to Check Point. Fortunately, people who have the most current version of Android, the mobile operating system developed and maintained by Google, are not subject to getting hurt by Agent Smith.

The majority of the world’s victims are located in India. There – it’s also the second-largest country in the world in terms of population – some 15 million users’ phones were infected with the Agent Smith malware.

Fortunately for us here in the United States, only roughly 300,000 phones were infected with the malware, with just 137,000 phones becoming infected across the United Kingdom.

With a total of some 25 million people affected by the cybersecurity threat, this is one of the worst cybersecurity issues that Google has faced that relates to its Android operating system.

Although most mobile apps are downloaded via the official Android app store, the Google Play store, some users choose to get their apps through 9apps.com, a third-party provider of mobile apps for widespread consumer download that operates entirely independently of Google.

Alibaba, a Chinese retail e-commerce hub that is both one of the largest in the People’s Republic of China and the world at large, is credited as being the owner of 9apps.com. However, Alibaba employees are not responsible for the creation or dissemination of the Agent Smith malware.

Such attacks – those that aren’t carried out with help from Android’s official Google Play app store – usually primarily target Android users outside of the Western world, countries of which include the United States and the United Kingdom. Even though the cybercriminals who were responsible for the spread of Agent Smith only got through to less than 500,000 Android devices across the two countries, they certainly consider it a success. This is because Android users in the United States and the United Kingdom are better off than their internationally-based counterparts.