Once again, the criminals managed to bypass the security measures of the marketplace most used by Android users. THE BitDefender Researchers have no fewer than 35 . dug up malicious applications distributed through the Play Store by Google. The most popular had 100,000 downloads and reached about 2 million users in total.
The researchers found a recurring pattern. The identified applications are almost all designed to show potentially dangerous ads In addition, for the user, once you download the apps, they change their name, to make it more difficult to find and uninstall them.
For example an app called GPS Location Maps, with more than 100,000 downloads, after being downloaded by the victim, it changes its icon and name to take the form of the menu to access phone settings. Using WebViews, the app in question cyclically displays different types of advertisements to the user, which can sometimes redirect the user to dangerous sites – where there is a risk of downloading even more malicious malware.
By bombarding the user with malicious ads, criminals can easily monetize their huge audience of victims. As advertisements for illegal products, gambling or in fact all kinds of scams, these are clearly very profitable advertisements for developers.
Still analyzing GPS location maps, the researchers pointed out that this is a product that is anything but banalotto. In fact, the criminals used rather sophisticated cryptographic techniques to complicate the lives of the researchers themselves, who have had more than a few problems with reverse engineering – and learn exactly how the fraud works.
The list of the most popular malicious applications discovered by BitDefender also includes Personality Charging Show, Image Warp Camera, and Animated Sticker Master. Once you have downloaded them, we recommend that you delete them as soon as possible.
Source: Lega Nerd
