Security News
Google pulled 60 malware-infected apps from its Play Store, installed by more than 3.3 million punters, that can be used for all kinds of criminal activities including credential theft, spying and even stealing money from victims. Zscaler's ThreatLabZ and security researcher Maxime Ingrao from fraud protection firm Evina discovered the downloader apps stuffed with software nasties including Joker, Facestealer, Coper, and Autolycos malware - the latter is a new family, according to Ingrao, who named and discovered Autolycos in eight different apps with more than three million downloads to Android devices.
Cybersecurity researchers have discovered three Android malware families infiltrating the Google Play Store, hiding their malicious payloads inside many seemingly innocuous applications. The malicious activities suffered by users who installed the malware apps included stolen data, social media account takeovers, SMS interception, and unauthorized charges to their mobile numbers.
Google's Threat Analysis Group, whose primary goal is to defend Google users from state-sponsored attacks, said today that Russian-backed threat groups are still focusing their attacks on Ukrainian organizations. In a report regarding recent cyber activity in Eastern Europe, Google TAG security engineer Billy Leonard revealed that hackers part of the Turla Russian APT group have also been spotted deploying their first Android malware.
State-backed hackers part of Russia's Federation Foreign Intelligence Service have started using Google Drive legitimate cloud storage service to evade detection. "We have discovered that their two most recent campaigns leveraged Google Drive cloud storage services for the first time," Unit 42 analysts who spotted the new trend said.
A court in Moscow has imposed a fine of $358 million on Google LLC for failing to restrict access to information considered prohibited in the country. Last month, the organization fined 68 million rubles Google LLC for the umpteenth time for failure to remove prohibited information.
Google has removed eight apps from its Google Play store that were propagating a new variant of the Joker spyware, but not before they already had garnered more than 3 million downloads. The trojan would hide in the advertisement frameworks utilized by the malicious apps propagating it; these frameworks aggregate and serve in-app ads.
Following the launch of a new "Data safety" section for the Android app on the Play Store, Google appears to be readying to remove the app permissions list from both the mobile app and the web. The Data safety section, which Google began rolling out in late April 2022, is the company's answer to Apple's Privacy Nutrition Labels in iOS, allowing users to have a unified view of an app's data collection and processing practices.
A new Android malware family on the Google Play Store that secretly subscribes users to premium services was downloaded over 3,000,000 times. The malware, named 'Autolycos,' was discovered by Evina's security researcher Maxime Ingrao to be in at least eight Android applications, two of which are still available on the Google Play Store at the time of this writing.
A new ransomware family is being delivered as a bogus Google Software Update, using Microsoft functionality as part of its attack. Researchers with Trend Micro say they uncovered the latest threat, dubbed "HavanaCrypt", a ransomware package that presents itself as a Google Software Update though it is a.NET-compiled application.
Google is testing a new 'Quick Intensive Throttling' feature that reduces CPU time by 10%, extending the battery life for laptops and mobile devices. In Chrome 87, Google introduced a new feature called 'Intensive Wake Up Throttling' that prevents JavaScript from waking up a tab more than once a minute after it has been suspended and hidden from view for more than 5 minutes.