Tag Archives: Android

Security researchers at Check Point have discovered a disturbing new strain of Android malware that’s as ingenious as it is disturbing.  It is effective because it is designed to replace a rapidly expanding number of apps with poisoned copies.

The app copies still retain their core functionality, making the malware notoriously difficult to detect.

After all, if you downloaded JioTV, a photo editing app of some kind, or a game, and the app works as you expect it to, why would you even suspect that it was malware?  Unfortunately, that’s exactly what this new malware strain does.

Dubbed ‘Agent Smith,’ the malware takes advantage of different android vulnerabilities and injects malicious code into the APK files of targeted apps defined by a list inside the code. They then automatically update and re-install them without the device owner’s knowledge or consent.

The Check Point researchers had this to say about the new strain:

“It’s not enough for this malware family to swap just one innocent application with an infected double.  It does so for each and every app on the device, as long as the package names are on its prey list.

Over time, this campaign will also infect the same device repeatedly, with the latest malicious patches.  This leads us to estimate there are to be over 2.8 billion infections in total, on around 25 million unique devices, meaning that on average, each victim would have suffered roughly 112 swaps of innocent applications.”

Of course, the last thing the malware’s creators want is for the app to be legitimately updated. So part of the strain’s design is to disable that functionality from inside the app so the hackers can control the updates.

If there’s a silver lining, it is that to date, the malware doesn’t contain any data siphoning or data destroying code.  All it does is display ads.  Unfortunately, the malware strain’s owners can easily shift gears any time they want to.

Bad news for Android users.  Recently, Google discovered that more than two hundred apps on the Play Store had been infected with the ‘BeiTaAd’ plugin. This plugin is the latest in a large and growing collection of advertising libraries that have been misused and abused by advertisers.

It should be noted that BeiTaAd didn’t start off being problematic.

The plugin has been around since early 2018, and in the beginning, there was no problem.  It was a simple package that allowed for the easy automation of online ads inside of perfectly legitimate apps.  Further, it was highly trusted because it came from a legitimate company with a market of more than a hundred million users.

Unfortunately, that didn’t hold. In February of 2019, the app began behaving badly, forcing a large influx of popup ads onto users even when the apps weren’t running.  Worse, the plugin’s developers seemed to understand that the change in behavior wouldn’t sit well with those subjected to increasing numbers of ads. They then took steps to obfuscate their code to make it less obvious that BeiTaAd was the culprit.

In the end, the aggressive display of ads caught the attention of seasoned researchers who tracked the issue to its source.  Google moved swiftly to shut down the misbehaving plugin, but in order to do so, they were forced to remove 238 apps from the Play Store. These were apps that had been installed hundreds of millions of times by users all over the world.

If you’ve recently been bombarded by popup ads that seem to come out of nowhere, BeiTaAd is likely the cause.  Check the apps on your phone and update to the latest versions as a first step.  If that doesn’t do the trick, you’ll need to go through your apps one by one to chase down the specific culprit.  It’s not an elegant solution, but it will stop those unwanted ads.

Do you use an Android App called ‘WiFi Finder’?  If so, be advised that your network password has likely been exposed, based on research conducted by Sanyam Jain, of the GDI Foundation.

Jain discovered an unprotected database online associated with the app that contained more than two million network passwords.

He reported his findings to Zack Whittaker of TechCrunch, and the two of them spent more than two weeks trying to contact the Chinese-based developer to no avail. When that effort failed, they contacted DigitalOcean, the company hosting the database, and they promptly pulled it offline.

As to the app itself, WiFi Finder is very good at what it does, and it does what the name suggests. It searches for WiFi hotspots and maps them, giving users the ability to upload all their stored WiFi passwords.

Unfortunately, the app isn’t picky.  It makes no distinction between public and private hotspots.  If your neighbor has an unprotected router, it’ll show up on the list.

According to statistics obtained from Google, WiFi Finder has been downloaded more than 100,000  times. Given how many WiFi hotspots there are all over the world, each user is bound to have a dozen or more mapped by the app, which translates into a lot of hotspots in the database, considering the size of the database Jain found.

If there’s a bright spot to be found in the incident, the database did not include contact information for the WiFi owners. However, it did contain geolocation data, and of course, if you saved your passwords in the app, then that was included as well.

If you’re currently using the app, to be safe, you should probably delete it and find a better option. Then change your Wi-Fi passwords, as there’s no telling who may now have access.