Malicious Apps Get Back on the Play Store Just by Changing Their Name (bleepingcomputer.com)

Malicious Android apps that have been previously reported to Google are showing up again on company's marquee Play Store with new names, security researchers are reporting. BleepingComputer: Seven of these apps have been "rediscovered," said Symantec in a report published yesterday. The company's experts say the author of the original malicious apps didn't do anything special, but only changed the app's names, without making modifications to the code, and re-uploaded the apps on the Play Store from a new developer account under a new name. Symantec says it detected seven of these re-uploaded apps on the Play Store, which it re-reported to Google's security team and had them taken down again.

Comments

Re:Seems Google doesn't check anything but your em

[Zocalo]

Of course it's ridiculously easy to spoof - I even said how you'd do it in my post - and that's my point; Google are apparently not even doing the kind of basic checks that early AV software was doing in the late 1990's, let alone the kind of modern heuristical scanning that current AV tools use, which is what I'd have expected them to be doing. It's well known in security circles that most malware writers re-use a lot of common code libraries and other "kits" from the darknet and other forums that they then modify to suit, so that Google hasn't successfully automated that kind of scanning on app submission to their own store beggars belief, especially given the number of well regarded security experts they have on thier payroll.