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Gionee Fined for Pre-installing Malware in Some Smartphones
The US government has accused Huawei of installing backdoors in its telecom hardware that allow the Chinese government to spy on those making calls through their equipment. Proof of such allegations has been hard to come by but seems to be of little consequence to the current administration, which sanctioned Huawei several times. In the interim Chinese smartphone brand Gionee, between late 2018 and October 2019 placed malware on 20m of its phones, although not necessarily for spying.
A Chinese court ruled that the company and a second Chinese company used an automatic app update to insert a Trojan pull-in that opened the door to push unsolicited ads that carried a profit of ~30%. The Trojan applications allowed the phones to be accessed over 2.8b times. The two lead participants, one from each firm were sentenced to 3.5 years in prison and a bit over $30,000 each. While not exactly world class espionage, it does show how easy it is to hack smartphones, as most people allow the phone to do automatic updates fop applications already on the phone. Right before Gionee fell into bankruptcy in 2018, the company’s founder and Chairman was said to have lost $144m in a casino in Saipan. Gionee was acquired by Karbon Mobiles in India after a few months in bankruptcy.
The US government has accused Huawei of installing backdoors in its telecom hardware that allow the Chinese government to spy on those making calls through their equipment. Proof of such allegations has been hard to come by but seems to be of little consequence to the current administration, which sanctioned Huawei several times. In the interim Chinese smartphone brand Gionee, between late 2018 and October 2019 placed malware on 20m of its phones, although not necessarily for spying.
A Chinese court ruled that the company and a second Chinese company used an automatic app update to insert a Trojan pull-in that opened the door to push unsolicited ads that carried a profit of ~30%. The Trojan applications allowed the phones to be accessed over 2.8b times. The two lead participants, one from each firm were sentenced to 3.5 years in prison and a bit over $30,000 each. While not exactly world class espionage, it does show how easy it is to hack smartphones, as most people allow the phone to do automatic updates fop applications already on the phone. Right before Gionee fell into bankruptcy in 2018, the company’s founder and Chairman was said to have lost $144m in a casino in Saipan. Gionee was acquired by Karbon Mobiles in India after a few months in bankruptcy.
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