Security News
A fake Android SMS application, with 100,000 downloads on the Google Play store, has been discovered to secretly act as an SMS relay for an account creation service for sites like Microsoft, Google, Instagram, Telegram, and Facebook. "Fake app I just download this app 4-5 times of OTP by Google, Airtel payment, Bank OTP, dream11 OTP, etc. Type of OTP comes at the time of login," reads one of the reviews.
A threat actor associated with cyberespionage operations since at least 2017 has been luring victims with fake VPN software for Android that is a trojanized version of legitimate software SoftVPN and OpenVPN. Researchers say that the campaign was "Highly targeted" and aimed at stealing contact and call data, device location, as well as messages from multiple apps. ESET malware analyst Lukas Stefanko says that Bahamut repackaged the SoftVPN and OpenVPN apps for Android to include malicious code with spying functions.
A set of five medium-severity security flaws in Arm's Mali GPU driver has continued to remain unpatched on Android devices for months, despite fixes released by the chipmaker. "These fixes have not yet made it downstream to affected Android devices," Project Zero researcher Ian Beer said in a report.
The cyber espionage group known as Bahamut has been attributed as behind a highly targeted campaign that infects users of Android devices with malicious apps designed to extract sensitive information. The activity, which has been active since January 2022, entails distributing rogue VPN apps through a fake SecureVPN website set up for this purpose, Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET said in a new report shared with The Hacker News.
The Android banking fraud malware known as SharkBot has reared its head once again on the official Google Play Store, posing as file managers to bypass the app marketplace's restrictions. SharkBot, first discovered towards the end of 2021 by Cleafy, is a recurring mobile threat distributed both on the Google Play Store and other third-party app stores.
A set of five exploitable vulnerabilities in Arm's Mali GPU driver remain unfixed months after the chip maker patched them, leaving potentially millions of Android devices exposed to attacks. The vulnerability impacts Arm Mali GPU kernel drivers Valhall r29p0 to r38p0.
A new collection of malicious Android apps posing as harmless file managers had infiltrated the official Google Play app store, infecting users with the Sharkbot banking trojan. Because the trojan apps are file managers, it's less likely to raise suspicions when requesting dangerous permissions for loading the Sharkbot malware.
DuckDuckGo for Android's 'App Tracking Protection' feature has reached open beta, allowing all Android users to block third-party trackers across all their installed apps. The 'App Tracking Protection' aims to increase privacy throughout the entire operating system by blocking third-party tracking scripts in other Android apps installed on the device.
Internet behemoth Google on Tuesday said it plans to roll out Privacy Sandbox for Android in beta to mobile devices running Android 13 starting early next year. "The Privacy Sandbox Beta will be available for ad tech and app developers who wish to test the ads-related APIs as part of their solutions," the company said.
Google announced today that they will begin rolling out the Privacy Sandbox system on a limited number of Android 13 devices starting in early 2023. The Privacy Sandbox is a set of technologies Google introduced in February this year, aiming to limit the tracking of users while still providing advertisers with viable performance-measurement options.