Does anyone know if you could get a malware rootkit on your android phone? My situation is for the past week there has been a lot of spam e-mail being sent from my e-mail account. I have scanned and rescanned and even had professionals look at my computer and nothing found. I deleted my gmail account (painful reloading my phone) and the spam has now followed to new e-mail address. I am at a loss unless its somewhere in my phone. I'm using a Samsung Captivate with stock 2.1 ROM which has never been rooted. Any help would be appreciated.
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Android rootkit?
- Thread starter edpAR
- Start date
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- samsung captivate
sremick
Android Expert
Just because the "From:" in an email says your email address, doesn't mean it came from you. In fact, it most-likely did not. It's trivially easy to forge the "From:" field when sending emails, and spammers usually do this intentionally.
One common scenario is for a PC to get infected with malware that uses it as a spam relay. The infected PC is scanned for all address books and the addresses found are then used to randomly fill in the "From:" field as well as the "To:" fields so that the spam appears to come within that person's circle of contacts, giving it a greater chance of being opened and read.
So likely it's not your PC but the PC of someone you once emailed or who emailed you.
Any "professional" who took 30 seconds looking at the full headers of the spam email could've easily figured out whether it was actually coming from your computer or not. I'd suggest finding a better place to take your PC.
To answer your general question, "Does anyone know if you could get a malware rootkit on your android phone?" the answer is "yes", if it was rooted... however I know of no malware for Android that uses it as a spam relay. Desktop Windows PCs are the pretty much the exclusive target.
One common scenario is for a PC to get infected with malware that uses it as a spam relay. The infected PC is scanned for all address books and the addresses found are then used to randomly fill in the "From:" field as well as the "To:" fields so that the spam appears to come within that person's circle of contacts, giving it a greater chance of being opened and read.
So likely it's not your PC but the PC of someone you once emailed or who emailed you.
Any "professional" who took 30 seconds looking at the full headers of the spam email could've easily figured out whether it was actually coming from your computer or not. I'd suggest finding a better place to take your PC.
To answer your general question, "Does anyone know if you could get a malware rootkit on your android phone?" the answer is "yes", if it was rooted... however I know of no malware for Android that uses it as a spam relay. Desktop Windows PCs are the pretty much the exclusive target.