Lockdroid Re-appears With New and Improved Voice Technology to Unlock Ransomed Devices

Over a year ago, researchers discovered a nasty piece of ransomware that could lock, change PINs of, and wipe data from Android devices. It was named Lockdroid by Symantec. It included a trick to convince users to give its creators administrator rights to the devices.

This isn’t the news now though. While that version is still roaming around out there, researchers have found a revised variant that will still lock the device and do all those things, but also tries something new and innovative; speech recognition to unlock the device.

Security experts are not quite sure what can be done with the speech technology, but it shows that malware developers are always trying new things. Who knows what they could do with the voice recordings in the future, should that be their goal. Perhaps it's merely an experiment; but it is a different and new spin on the ransomware.

According to the researchers at Symantec who found this variant, it abuses third party speech recognition functionality and in some cases, “the recognized words are normalized to accommodate any small degree of inaccuracies that an automated speech recognizer is bound to.”

There are flaws with this implementation, they found. For example, as with the original version, it still requires another device be used in order to get the codes to unlock it. Researchers also found several implementation bugs. But what it does show is that these bad guys just never stop trying to extort money from their victims.

In this case, the ransomware seems to be targeting only Chinese speakers. However, it’s only a matter of time before they make it to other languages.

In the meantime, make sure your devices have security tools installed and that they are kept up-to-date at all times. In addition, when you see a notification that an update is available for your operating system, don’t delay in applying it.

Also, perform regular backups of your devices. If ransomware or another type of malware should hit you, it’s much easier to restore from a recent backup than to start adding all your information manually again.

Finally, don't sideload apps. They can contain malware. Get them from the official app store for your device. If any app or program requests administrator permissions, even if you got from the app store, just say “no.” It is a very rare case that any of them needs these and if they ask, it’s highly likely that it is up to no good.