Beware Android users! Check out Central government's advisory on 'Daam' virus

The Central government has issued an advisory against a malware called ‘Daam’ that infects Android phones. The virus can hack into your call records, contacts, history and camera, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team or CERT-In advisory says. The national cyber security agency advisory has warned that the ‘Daam’ virus is capable of “bypassing anti-virus programs and deploying ransomware on the targeted devices".

Avoid downloading materials from unknown sources

The Android botnet gets distributed through third-party websites or applications downloaded from untrusted/unknown sources.

How will the Daam Virus affect your device and its data?

The government advisory also said that the 'Daam' virus is also capable of hacking phone call recordings, contacts, gaining access to camera, and modifying device passwords. Not just this, the virus can also take screenshot, steal SMSes, downloading/uploading files, etc. and transmitting to the C2 (command-and-control) server from the victim's device.

Risk of data getting DELETED

The malware, it said, utilises the AES (advanced encryption standard) encryption algorithm to code files in the victim's device. Due to this, other files get deleted from the storage and only the encrypted filed are left with “.enc" extension and a ransom note “readme_now.txt".

Beware of shortened URLs

It also asked users to exercise caution towards shortened URLs (uniform resource locators), such as those involving 'bitly' and 'tinyurl' hyperlinks like: "https://bit.ly/", "\nbit.ly" and "tinyurl.com/".