World-renowned adventurous game Minecraft is now in the news for all wrong reasons. Security experts from Symantec have discovered that the game has the potential to hijack a mobile with Sockbot malware and turn it into a botnet.
Researchers from the said Cybersecurity firm has discovered that the Trojan links infected devices to a proxy server to maliciously generate advertising revenue to malware developers and then turn the device into a botnet.
Security firm Symantec has issued an alert that Minecraft: Pocket edition is designed to generate ad revenue in an illegitimate way and so users are advised to stay away from the app which is available in Google play store.
Experts say that Sockbot can easily take advantage of a number of network-based vulnerabilities and can turn into a highly flexible proxy topology. They add in their report that in addition to the usual arbitrary network attacks, the malware can also launch distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
Symantec says that the infected gaming app has been installed on more than 2.8 million Android devices and most of the infected gadgets happen to be from US, Russia, Ukraine, Germany, and Brazil.
Note 1- Symantec has issued an alert on the issue to Microsoft which acquired the game for 1.5 billion pounds in September 2014.
Note 2- Google is doing its best to keep its Play Store free from malware. But still, some malware developers are managing to spread their notorious software by disguising them in apps which have gained popularity to generate ad revenues.
