Search giant Google has come out strongly to defend itself against claims that a virus has infected some of its Android phones making the devices to “churn out spam.”
Google, in a statement, said there were no evidence to support the claims.
Terry Zink, one of Microsoft researchers, was reported on July 4 to have discovered evidence of the Android phones being enrolled in a botnet, which uses infected PCS to generate spam.
Zink said he found evidence Android smartphones were being used in a similar way.
Google’s investigations dispute Zink’s claims suggesting its analysis found that spammers are using infected PCs and fake mobile signatures to bypass anti-spam mechanisms integrated in the email platform they are using.
The junk messages came from PCs, Google said, however, the spammers who sent them had formatted them to look like they originated from Android smartphones.
According to the search giant, by taking this step, the junk mail are poised to have a better chance of defeating spam as well as ensure that messages reached inboxes.
If the spams came from a botnet made up of Android phones, Google said, it would be the first ever.
Mobile security firm Lookout also questioned Zink’s claims saying it was possible the spam was coming from some of Android phones infected with a malicious program.
Lookout said: “Unfortunately, this level of information is not enough to definitively identify any particular cause of the spam messages, since such information is easily replicable. In order for the botnet explanation to be valid, each of the originating devices would have to be infected with mobile malware. While this is certainly a possibility (and one that we can’t refute), there is another explanation that we believe is significantly more likely.”
Zink later agreed in a follow-up to his original post saying there were no proofs that the phones had been compromised.
He stated that it was possible the spammers had “faked the message formatting to make it look like it originated on a phone.”
