Android and iPhone apps that steal your data?

A piece of news that could be shocking for some of the Android-based smartphone users out there: there is an app in the Android marketplace that, if installed on your phone, might steal all the information from it and send it to China. The app is called Jackeey Wallpaper and it is quite popular.

The news were presented by two representatives of Lookout, a mobile security company, at the hackers / computer security conference called Black Hat that was held in Las Vegas today.

The app itself is harmless, it does not do anything wrong on its own, but it was tampered with – malicious persons try to use its popularity to steal and use your personal data. According to Kevin MaHaffey, chief technological officer at Lookout, any app can be modified and turned bad after many people have downloaded it. So people should be very careful of what they download and developers should be responsible about what data they collect and what they do with it.

300.000 applications for today’s most popular mobile platforms, iPhone and Android, were surveyed, and the result of the survey is quite shocking: 14% of the apps present in Apple’s App Store are capable of accessing the user’s address book. This percentage is much smaller in Android’s case: only 8% of the surveyed Android applications can do this.

33% of the free apps in App Store can access the owner’s location without their knowledge, as iOS 4 needs a third party application to inform the user about an application’s attempt to access this information. Most of the surveyed apps contain tracking codes, ad codes and other third party code, and nearly a quarter of them can access images, text messages or internet history without informing the user about it.