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A New Malware Called AdThief Has Reportedly Infected Over 75,000 Jailbroken Devices

by 34 Comments

In April this year, an iOS malware called Unflod was infecting jailbroken devices and stealing the Apple ID and password of the users. It is possible to have your jailbroken iOS device infected if you download pirated tweaks from pirated repos. Now, there’s a new malware called AdThief, which has infected about 75,000 jailbroken devices so far.

AdThief, also known as spad, was discovered by security researcher Claud Xiao in March this year. This is an iOS malware that is only found in jailbroken devices and it hijacks advertisement revenues and redirects them to the attacker.

AdThief-jailbreak-malware

This malware basically swaps an ad publishers id with that of the attacker, directing all the ad revenue to him and making him rich. According to the research paper published by Axelle Apvrille, revenue from over 21 million ads were hijacked using this malware. Ad networks such as Google’s AdMob and Mobile Ads were among the 15 different that were targeted.

After some digging, it was found that a Chinese hacker named Rover12421 was behind the malware. He did come forth and admit to working on spad sometime ago, but stated that he did not have any involvement in this malware. According to him, it was his only iOS project and he worked on it for a while, wrote some code, but is now closed. We can’t be sure if he’s telling the truth or just trying to avoid any charges. We are also not sure and neither is the security researcher, on how this malware infects jailbroken devices. It is built over Cydia’s Substrate platform and pirated tweaks could be one way how this makes its way into your iOS device.

Comments

  1. unknown null says

    Thanks for letting us know but should have put how to remove “if” you have this malware.

  2. TechPro says

    Easy, download tweaks from BiteYourApple/HackYouriPhone. They do not have malware (I have downloaded tweaks from them since 2011)

  3. Joshua Jones Makaveli says

    It doesnt matter if you have a jailbreak just use apples 2 step verification and your save and if you dont feel that change the pass.

  5. Harry says

    All of my three devices (iPad Air 3G, iPad 2,4, iPhone 4 GSM) running 7.1.1-7.1.2 (jailbroken), apps have been crashing and they have Ben randomly doing a respring

  10. Haduken2g says

    Pay those damn two dollars for a tweak and you won’t run into issues.
    Don’t add ANY repos except coolstar’s and angelxwind’s.

  18. Joshua Jones Makaveli says

    I don’t care if they hack my iPhone I don’t use any banking account on it so it’s worthless.

  26. Haduken2g says

    Well, full name, phone number, email address and the road where you live is pretty good deal still… if they can buy APps, they can also access your details indeed.

  29. Dani Hayes says

    I’ve never had an issue with a cracked app that the full app didn’t have as well. Talking about conflicts with other apps and tweaks.

  30. Joshua Jones Makaveli says

    Every detail I put on my accounts is fake and I got a location scrambler jailbreak tweak so it doesn’s show my real location.

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