Google has recently deleted 29 malicious apps that were advertised as “Beauty Camera” apps but sharing pornographic content and forwarding to the users, especially in India, and carried activities such as stealing user’s profile picture.
These apps were revealed by cybersecurity firm Trend Micro, it is also reported that some of these Android apps have already been downloaded number of times. A maximum number of the download counts were from the Asia region. Total 29 malicious apps were downloaded near about 4 million times before deleted from the Google Play Store.
According to the Trend Micro report, “After downloading one of such malicious apps, users will not feel like there is anything wrong until they try to delete it. These apps also used compression archives which are also called as packers, to make them unable to analyze.
Some of These apps display full-screen advertisements for fake or pornographic content every time when the smartphone is unlocked. Some of them were direct users to the phishing websites that will try to steal user’s personal data such as profile picture and other sensitive information. Likewise some of the attempts to steal the user’s contact details. Trend Micro also exposed that an adult video player which did not play any video after it was purchased.
One of them more terrible activities of malicious apps war requesting users to upload photographs to “Beautify” them. But at the same time images were uploaded to the private server. Trend Micro discovered that the images were stolen, and used for making fake social media accounts and for other misuses.
This is not the first time that security problems were exposed in Android apps. The previous year, there were apps which traced children’s private information, and secretly recorded the Android mobile’s screen, and tried to phish crypto-currency logins. To avoid such cyber-attacks users need to only download Google Play Store apps which are made by trusted publisher and developers.