Google Play Store removes over 130 Android Apps that were influenced by malicious coding

It is clear that every software can face certain security obstacles as it is difficult to be in control of every single detail. Google Play store is a cool and modern app-shop for devices with Android operating systems. Nevertheless, it is not immune to mistakes, flaws and vulnerabilities. This article focuses on the news that Google somehow missed 132 potentially dangerous applications and promoted them for quite some time. In all, 7 separate developers were discovered to be responsible for the harmful applications, all trying to attract users with DIY tutorials. However, security researchers have raised a question whether these developers intentionally designed their apps in a malicious manner or it was just an unfortunate accident. Good news is that Google already managed to eliminate those applications from its store. Therefore, they are no longer posing a threat.

From the first glance, applications that we are referring to as potentially detrimental did not strike as dangerous. Their appearance was not exceptional, but it did managed to provide useful tips for domestic-activities like knitting. However, certain features were concealed from the people that downloaded those software applications. They appear to have been hiding secret HTML-based iFrame tags. The latter tags were not always used as they could have been replaced with Microsoft’s Visual Basic language. What were hackers trying to achieve with these concealed traits? Well, their presence meant that it was possible to obtain connection to 2 compromising websites. In addition to that, the downloaded applications had the abilities to display full-screen ads that cover the interface of their host application. This is an extremely common feature in Android applications, but it becomes a problem when their origin can be malicious third-parties.

According to the published security report, all applications shared a similar coding-structure. This statements could be understood in a different way: all of the removed applications might have been designed from one platform. For this reason, analysts suggest that the creators of those apps did not intentionally made their products unreliable. It appears to be that the blame should be placed on a malicious app generation platform which was used by those seven developers.

Currently, 132 malicious apps are no longer available in the Google Play Store. They were removed after attention was drawn to the possibility of them infecting people with Windows-based malware. However, the malicious applications were distributed for quite some time and thousands of people might have downloaded them. We have to admit that recognizing potentially dangerous software is a complicated task, especially when people automatically assume that Google Play store distributes only reliable tools. Spoiler alert: it does not. There have been various of cases when this interactive shopping center had to delete certain applications that transmitted ransomware or malware infections. Therefore, this incident is not news to us, but it might be an unheard of situation for most people.

Source: pcworld.com.