The only good news is that Check Point discovered the threat early, before these apps found their way onto millions of devices. “And the apps themselves were removed.’’ MORE FROM FORBES Why You Should Stop Using Gmail On Your iPhone By Zak DoffmanĪnd so, yet again, here’s a warning to remove a bunch of apps from your phones. “These apps were malicious from their core,” Hazum says. Sometimes, when we see reports into Android malware, the issue is rogue SDKs buried within new and existing apps. “While looking into the fake developer accounts on Google Play,” Check Point says, “the developer email for all apps is the same email and the links to each application for the Privacy Policy page links to the same repository, also belonging to the same actor.” You’d think this might flag a warning, but clearly not. It would help, says security researcher Sean Wright, if users “don’t install apps which they don’t need, and pay close attention to the permissions which the apps are requesting for example, a flashlight app requesting access to your contacts is immediately suspicious, and read the reviews, especially the poor ones.”īut, as we’ve seen before, even where apps are created on an industrial scale by networks of developers, there are often clues left behind that one would think might give the game away. “This time,” Ahmed says, “a hacker stitched together basic, readily available third-party apps to bypass Play Store’s protections, in order to lace malware in a handful of everyday utility apps.”

New privacy protections are coming, but this appears as Google following Apple before it falls too far behind. I’d have more sympathy for Google’s fight against novel approaches such as this to evade its security if it wasn’t for its seemingly casual approach to adware, the fact that apps like SuperVPN find their way back onto the store despite repeated bad behavior, and if permission abuse on Android wasn’t so rife. As Check Point explains, “the payload dropped by Clast82 does not originate from Google Play, thus the scanning of applications before submission to review will not prevent the installation of the malicious payload.”

But once approved and switched on, it downloaded dangerous malware onto the device.

And, switched off, it didn’t exhibit any bad behaviors when operating. Put simply, the app uploaded to Play Store had no issues with its own code and so didn’t trigger any alerts.

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