Gionee has been recently flagged guilty for implanting a malware known as “Trojan Horse” into their smartphones. The Chinese Judgment Document Network revealed that Gionee has been moving malware into their various smartphones since December 2018 to October 2019. It was revealed that their main aim of doing this is to make more profit and scale up their phone business.

Speaking of profit, they use this malware to share ads on their smartphones and the way they send out this malware is through app updates. Gionee has been a good phone company for a long time but suddenly they went down due to financial issues but even at that, they kept making smartphones, though low-end smartphones. But them using this approach to maximize revenue is absolutely wrong.

Since December 2018 that they have been sending out this malware, they have managed to reach and infect 20 million smartphones of theirs, resulting to a higher revenue. The court found out that it’s Gionee’s subsidiary company known as “Zhipu Technology Co. Limited” that is responsible for dishing out this malware via app update.

They use one app to execute this malware which is “Story Lock Screen App”. They provide minor update for the app and then implant this malware in that update and send it out to the phones they targeted. When the update arrives, it automatically updates without the user’s concert or permission using the pull method. After that, they can now use the app to serve unsolicited ads plus other unaware activities to generate revenue.

In accordance to the court, Beijing Baice company and Shenzhen Zhipu Technology executed the ‘pull activities’ a total of 2.88 billion times. It is believed that from April 2019, the monthly pull activity surpassed more than 21.75 million. With this, both the companies are estimated to have earned around CNY 27.85 million ($4m) from this method, while the expenses for that period are just a little CNY 8.425 million ($1.2m).

For this, the court has now held Shenzhen Zhipu Technology guilty of illegally controlling the computer information system. Court has sentenced four persons to three years and six months of jail terms. They have also charged the company CNY 200,000 ($30,600) fine as well. The name of the four persons include Xu Li, Zhu Ying, Jia Zhengqiang, and Pan Qi.


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