Millions of Cheap Android Phones Have Backdoors Communicating With China

Buying a budget phone may be a great way to save money as you get all the basic features of a smartphone at a very low price. However, a new report has revealed that budget phone users may be paying more through a backdoor communicating with China installed on millions of these devices.

The report claims the backdoor sends text messages to China every 72 hours and also sends users call log, contact list and location history. According to New York Times, Shanghai Adups Technology Company, the company that developed the backdoor software, said that the code runs on over  700 million Android devices globally.

Kryptowire, the company that detected the backdoor, said that users are unable to disable this surveillance. Shanghai Adups Technology Company claims that the software was written at the request of an unnamed Chinese manufacturer that claimed to need the data for customer support.

Adups is yet to publish a list of affected devices but according to its website, the company provides software for Huawei and ZTE. Huawei has issued a statement that refutes the claim that the software company is business partner. According to a Huawei spokesperson:

Huawei takes our customers’ privacy and security very seriously, and we work diligently to safeguard that privacy and security. The company mentioned in this report is not on our list of approved suppliers, and we have never conducted any form of business with them.

About 120,000 BLU smartphones are also affected and the company has released a statement:

BLU Products has identified and has quickly removed a recent security issue caused by a third-party application which had been collecting unauthorized personal data in the form of text messages, call logs, and contacts from customers using a limited number of BLU mobile devices.

Since BLU and Gionee co-develop products, there’s a chance Gionee may be affected too. The secret backdoor wasn’t an accident, it was intentionally installed on millions of devices to collect user data without permission. For now, the full extent of the damage is unknown, but 700 million is quite a huge number.