Android users are on the receiving end of a virus campaign that promotes the Taicheetee.com site by spawning incredibly annoying pop-ups and browser tabs.
Dirty traffic monetization schemes are a thorn in the side of numerous smartphone users who suddenly find themselves entrapped in a rabbit hole of Chrome and Safari browser redirects and pop-up ads that won’t seem to stop. The foul play with Taicheetee.com and URLs at its heart typifies this dynamically escalating cybercrime trend. It manifests itself through the random emergence of one or several new tabs in the Android version of Google Chrome. This activity gets particularly conspicuous when the device is unlocked after a relatively long period of inactivity. In this case, the site in question is sprinkled all over the browser and the user has quite a bit of tab closing work to do.
Push notifications added to the mix
Another facet of this problem involves what’s called web push notifications. In an ideal world, these are building blocks of effective e-marketing strategies. In practice, though, such messages are often mishandled to push sketchy online services in a hugely invasive way. From a cybercriminal’s perspective, the main benefit of leveraging this technique is that their notifications are shown outside of Chrome or whichever web browser is the victim’s default one. It means that such malvertising scams don’t even rely on the user opening a browser. Instead, the content is generated right on the Android device’s home screen in the form of rectangular boxes with short messages and links to Taicheetee.com in them.
How does the Taicheetee.com Android virus spread and how to purge it?
Although most affected users can’t remember allowing anything potentially unwanted to sneak into their smartphones recently, the infiltration of this pest is largely a matter of a slip-up. Some victims discover a bizarre barcode scanner app that sets the Taicheetee.com issue in motion. Once this rogue item is removed, the pop-up problem vanishes as well. The catch is that the app installs itself as part of a bundle and users are unaware of it.
That said, the key prerequisite for purging the pop-up virus is to get rid of the underlying malicious app. To rectify browser settings skewed by the threat and eliminate its fraudulently obtained permissions, it’s also recommended to reset the browser that’s acting up.
P.S. Apple iOS and macOS users are facing a similar issue with the SearchLee.com redirect on their iPhones and Macs.
Tags: android, app, Chrome, smaptphone, traffic monetization
