Yes, adventurous boys and girls, we’re afraid it’s that time of the yearmonth week (?!) again. Unfortunately, it has become all too common in recent months years for security researchers to discover seemingly harmless, often useful-looking, and sometimes very popular Android apps spreading dangerous malware behind the scenes, with the latest such revelation arriving roughly 10 days after the previous one.
New day, new danger, new method of avoiding attention
Such a scary picture for so many different reasons…
That either means the bulk of those reviews were fake, or perhaps even more worryingly, that the app’s developers actually invested their time and know-how into making it useful and functional while very carefully hiding its real intentions.
The long road back to safety
As you can imagine, that common and very easy-to-mistake title was part of the ploy devised by “QR BarCode Scanner Business LLC”, which is unsurprisingly not a real company either.
For what it’s worth, the app never crossed the 50,000 install barrier, but the 10,000+ users who did download it may want to get in touch with their bank as soon as possible, check their recent financial statements for fishy transactions, and change their passwords and other login credentials.
Android users in more and more regions are being threatened by this banking trojan.
While we don’t want you to get too scared and end up stashing all your money under your mattress, you might not be completely safe from this threat even if you use two-factor authentication for all your home and mobile banking operations.
