Everybody is tempted to install and use an app that claims to improve your phone in a way or in another, right? Especially if the app is free of charge. But nowadays, you surely shouldn’t believe everything that you see online. Furthermore, caution is always a good thing.
A research team recently concluded that a number of Android apps could infect your phone with malware while they are claiming of cleaning and speeding it up. It sounded too good to be true, right? The multinational cybersecurity and defense company Trend Micro brought the news.
Over 470,000 downloads
The malicious apps had plenty of time to conduct ad fraud on the targetted devices because they are present on the Play Store since 2017. Claiming to offer huge benefits for smartphones like cleaning and boosting up performance speeds, they had been downloaded 470,000 times.
The research team is claiming that the pesky apps can even compromise a user’s login details for Facebook and Google, and furthermore it explains:
The cybercriminals behind this campaign can use the affected device to post fake positive reviews in favor of the malicious apps, as well as perform multiple ad fraud techniques by clicking on the ads that pop up [in the software when it is opened],
The full list of apps
The list is not too long, but the names involved are pretty amusing: Shoot Clean, Super Clean Lite, Super Clean-Phone, Quick Games, Rocket Cleaner, Rocket Cleaner Lite, Speed Clean, LinkWorldVPN and H5 gamebox.
Finding out who is behind the malware flood is a must, but until now the researchers didn’t manage to get too much precious info. Instead, some preliminary investigation is suggesting that the cyber thieves are located in China. All we can do is wait eagerly for further details about the subject since any Android user should be as informed as possible.
