A new study discovers another 29 new malicious apps in the Play Store of Google. If you have any of them installed it is possible that someone has stolen your data and your photos.
This problem has become a normal thing. Almost every week some expert in cybersecurity launches an alarm about apps being hosted in the Google store for Android that is not what it looks.
They pretend to be all kind of programs to steal your data or to fill or of your phone with advertisments. But the alerts do not stop and there have been found another 29 of these “apps” hidden in the selfs of Play Store.
The experts that found them are part of a cybersecurity team called Trend Micro that made public the findig via a post in a corporative blog. In this post, they explain they found 29 “apps” that offered improvements for the camera or the photos in your mobile but behind this costume, they hid “phising” and user data robbery. 11 of them had their counter (Google already deleted them from the store) between 100000 and 1 million of downloads, which means that the number of affected people is pretty high. Between all the apps, the experts say that there are around 4 millions of installations.
The programs’ functioning has been really taken care of and they take advantage of the most inexpert users without even noticing it. When they download an app, it fills your browser with invisible advertisments that with a single click they send you to a “phising” webs where they, imitating other services, ask for your data and the take it. Besides, to protect their entirety, these “apps” do not appear in the download list which complicates their elimination and provoke that lot of users don’t know from where the adverts come from.
A very elaborated job that goes even further in the case of a part from the malicious programs pack where they do nto only fill your phone with adverts, they also promise you improvements in your photos through a cloud service and they steal your pictures. The only don’t give you back the edited photo, they even don’t give you back the original one.
The worst about this? That again is shown how Google is a strainer for this kind of apps and their filters do not work properly when the have to protect the users from malicious programs.
The 29 apps
If you have some doubt about having any of these apps in your phone, here you have a list with all of the detected programs:
If you had, or have, any of these “softwares” installed, the best you can do is to delete the program, change your passwords from all of the possible affected services and protect all the content. If you are not between the victims you got a new reason to take serious about what you download.