- More malware for Android apps has been found and removed from the Google Play Store, this time in the form of an app called Barcode Scanner.
- The researchers found that the application seemed legitimate at the same time and had accumulated about 10 million installations before adding the incomplete code, turning it into malicious software.
- Google has removed the app from the Play Store, but users will have to delete the app from their own Android device if they have one.
Hackers and bad actors are increasingly creative when it comes to trying to slip bad apps beyond the defenses of the Google Play Store, which we covered more and more regularly throughout 2020, a year in which we saw one example after another of incomplete Android apps taking advantage of users and quickly booting from the Google app store.
Examples included this batch of 24 Android apps, ranging from time to calendar and camera functionality, some of which were loaded with malware and requested incomplete permissions. Google kicked them out of the store, but not before accumulating about 382 million downloads. The same with this group of Android apps that could have stolen the login data of Facebook users, which accumulated approximately 470,000 downloads. Meanwhile, here we are here, in 2021, and the malware for Android apps is back on track, with a particularly incomplete Android app recently identified and kicked out of the Play Store after getting about 10 millions of installations.
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Via Malwarebytes, we met an application called Barcode Scanner that was available for years in the Play Store. This led to the accumulation of the 10 million facilities we have mentioned.
This application was intended to provide the user with a barcode generator and a QR code reader. Everything is fine so far. In fact, things apparently remained that way, seemingly legitimate, for years. But things have changed quite recently. “At the end of last December,” he notes Malwarebytes “We started getting a distress call from our forum patrons. Users were experiencing ads opening from scratch using their default browser. The weird part is that none of them have installed any apps recently. and the apps they had installed came from the Google Play Store. ”
Finally, a forum patron determined that this problem came from an application that had been installed some time ago: the barcode scanner. Malwarebytes says it quickly added detection and Google removed the Play Store app shortly after.
The update that appears to have changed this app (“from an innocent scanner to a full-fledged malware,” the report notes) occurred in early December and, by the way, while Google has removed the app from its own market, you still need to remove it from your Android device if you have one. In addition, this link will show you a video that represents what the application did to infected phones.
According to investigators, it appears that malicious code was inserted into the application that was not in previous versions of the application. And the new bit of code used “intense obfuscation” to try to prevent it from being detected. “Because of its malicious intent, we went from our original Adware detection category directly to Trojan,” the report adds, in a summary that you can view here in full.
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Andy is a reporter in Memphis who also contributes to outlets such as Fast Company and The Guardian. When he’s not writing about technology, he can be found crouching down with protection over his growing vinyl collection, in addition to taking care of his whovianism and indulging in various TV shows you probably don’t like.