- Several malware applications for Android applications have been found and removed from the Google Play Store, this time in the form of an application called Barcode Scanner.
- The researchers found that the application appeared to be legitimate at one point and that it accumulated about 10 million installations before the incomplete code was added, turning it into malware.
- Google has removed the app from the Play Store, but users will need to remove the app from their Android device if they have one.
Hackers and bad actors get more and more creative when it comes to trying to get rid of bad applications over the defenses of the Google Play Store, which we covered with increasing regularity during 2020 – a year in which we saw one example after another of lots of incomplete Android apps, taking advantage of users and quickly starting from the Google app store.
Examples included this batch of 24 Android apps, which cover everything from weather to calendar and camera functionality, some of which were loaded with malware and required sketch permissions. Google kicked them out of the store, but not before getting about 382 million downloads. The same goes for this group of Android applications that could have stolen users’ Facebook login data, which accumulated approximately 470,000 downloads. Here we are now, in the meantime, in 2021, and the malware for the Android application is back in speed – with a particularly sketchy Android application recently identified and removed from the Play Store after accumulating about 10 million installations.
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Via Malwarebytes, I found out about an app called Barcode Scanner that was actually available in the Play Store for years. This led to the accumulation of the 10 million installations we mentioned.
This application claimed to provide the user with a barcode generator and a QR code reader. Everything is fine so far. Indeed, things have apparently remained that way, seemingly legitimate, for years. But things have changed quite recently. “At the end of December,” he notes Malwarebytes report, “we started receiving a call for help from the owners of our forum. Employers faced ads that opened out of nowhere through their default browser. The weird part is that none of them recently installed any apps, and the apps they installed come from the Google Play Store. ”
Finally, a forum owner stated that this problem comes from an application that was installed some time ago: Barcode Scanner. Malwarebytes says it quickly added detection, and Google removed the app from the Play Store shortly.
The update that appears to have changed this app (“from an innocent scanner to completely full of malware!”, The report notes) took place in early December – and by the way, while Google removed the app from its own market, you’ll You still need to clean it from your Android device if you have one. This link will also show you a video describing what the application did on infected phones.
It appears that malicious code was introduced into the application that was not in previous versions of the application, according to the researchers. And the new bit of code used “heavy blur” to try not to be detected. “Due to its malicious intent, we have gone over our original category of Adware detection directly to Trojan,” the report added, in a summary that you can view in full here.
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Andy is a reporter in Memphis, who also contributes to stores such as Fast Company and The Guardian. When not writing about technology, he can be found squatting protectively over his thriving vinyl collection, as well as for taking care of Whovianism and getting into a variety of TV shows that you probably don’t like.