Security News

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.

Google has removed an Android VPN program from the Google Play store after researchers notified it of a critical vulnerability. VPNpro, a company that reviews and advises on VPN products, warned in February of a vulnerability in the product that could cause a man in the middle attack, enabling an intruder to insert themselves between the user and the VPN service.

Preying on public fears, the ongoing coronavirus outbreak is proving to be a goldmine of opportunity for attackers to stage a variety of malware attacks, phishing campaigns, and create scam sites and malicious tracker apps. Now in a fresh twist, third-party Android app developers too have begun to take advantage of the situation to use coronavirus-related keywords in their app names, descriptions, or in the package names so as to drop malware, perpetrate financial theft and rank higher in Google Play Store searches related to the topic.

More than 50 Android apps on the Google Play Store-most of which were designed for kids and had racked up almost 1 million downloads between them-have been caught using a new trick to secretly click on ads without the knowledge of smartphone users. While the offending apps have been removed from Google Play, the find by Check Point Research is the latest in an avalanche of ad fraud schemes that have plagued the app storefront in recent years, with malware posing as optimizer and utility apps to perform phony clicks on ads.

Researchers have identified eight malicious Android apps in the official Google Play marketplace distributing a new malware family. The comments under the Google Play download pages for these specific eight apps described the apps acting suspiciously, serving as red flags for potential downloaders.

Google has banned nearly 600 Android apps from the Play Store for bombarding users with disruptive ads and violating its advertising guidelines. Back in 2018, Cheetah Mobile was accused of turning smartphones into stealthy click farms to engage in ad fraud, leading Google to ban a bunch of its apps from the Play Store.