Gadgets and Gizmos

Smartphone app botnet experiment blows up a storm

Security researchers fooled nearly 8,000 iPhone and Android users into joining a mobile smartphone “botnet” under the guise of installing an apparently innocuous weather app.

Derek Brown and Daniel Tijerina of TippingPoint’s Digital Vaccine Group carried out the exercise in the run-up to a presentation at last week’s RSA Conference as an illustration of how easily social engineering tricks developed on the web and with PCs might be applied to internet-enabled smartphones. The duo’s WeatherFist app obtained users’ GPS coordinates and telephone numbers before providing local weather forecasts.