Security News

Researchers have uncovered a new set of fraudulent Android apps in the Google Play store that were found to hijack SMS message notifications for carrying out billing fraud. The apps in question primarily targeted users in Southwest Asia and the Arabian Peninsula, attracting a total of 700,000 downloads before they were discovered and removed from the platform.

A new set of malicious Android apps have been caught posing as app security scanners on the official Play Store to distribute a backdoor capable of gathering sensitive information. "These malicious apps urge users to update Chrome, WhatsApp, or a PDF reader, yet instead of updating the app in question, they take full control of the device by abusing accessibility services," cybersecurity firm McAfee said in an analysis published on Monday.

Researchers have discovered new Android malware that uses Netflix as its lure and spreads malware via auto-replies to received WhatsApp messages. read more

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered yet another piece of wormable Android malware-but this time downloadable directly from the official Google Play Store-that's capable of propagating via WhatsApp messages. Disguised as a rogue Netflix app under the name of "FlixOnline," the malware comes with features that allow it to automatically reply to a victim's incoming WhatsApp messages with a payload received from a command-and-control server.

Google has banned the conservative social networking app Parler from the Google Play Store for not removing posts that incite violence in the US. In a statement to BleepingComputer, Google stated that Parler was removed after repeated violations of policies that require Google Play apps to moderate user-generated content. Google Play Store policies require apps that display user-generated content to moderate and remove content that violates Google's policies, including threats of violence and harassment.

Google has stepped in to remove several Android applications from the official Play Store following the disclosure that the apps in question were found to serve intrusive ads. The findings were reported by the Czech cybersecurity firm Avast on Monday, which said the 21 malicious apps were downloaded nearly eight million times from Google's app marketplace.

Researchers have discovered more than 300 apps on the Google Play Store breaking basic cryptography code using a new tool they developed to dynamically analyze it. The research sheds new light on how easy it is for popular mobile apps-the ones analyzed had from hundreds of thousands of downloads to more than hundreds of millions-to break basic security rules, researchers noted in their work.

In a report published by Check Point research today, the malware - infamously called Joker - has found another trick to bypass Google's Play Store protections: obfuscate the malicious DEX executable inside the application as Base64 encoded strings, which are then decoded and loaded on the compromised device. "The Joker malware is tricky to detect, despite Google's investment in adding Play Store protections," said Check Point's Aviran Hazum, who identified the new modus operandi of Joker malware.

The apps were among a small haul of 38 beauty-themed apps the company detected from the same developer which were reported to Google for bombarding users with unwanted ads. As well as serving out of context ads at every opportunity, the apps also sent users to websites and made it difficult to de-install the apps using techniques such as hiding icons from the home screen and apps folder.

A newly uncovered strain of Android spyware lurked on the Google Play Store disguised as cryptocurrency wallet Coinbase, among other things, for up to four years, according to a new report by Bitdefender. Beginning with an innocuous-looking dropper hosted on the Google Play store, masquerading as one of a number of legitimate apps, Mandrake allowed its Russian operators to snoop on virtually everything unsuspecting targets did on their mobile phone.