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500,000 Duped Into Downloading Android Malware Posing As Driving Games On Google Play (forbes.com)
Be careful what you're downloading from Google Play. Especially if it's one of 13 apps posing as driving games created by one developer called Luiz Pinto. From a report: More than 560,000 have already been tricked into downloading the games, which include a mix of luxury car and truck simulation apps, as discovered by Android malware researcher Lukas Stefanko. Once installed on a user's Android device, the games don't actually work. Looking at the reviews on Google Play, users who downloaded them complained it was a virus. For instance, among the masses of one-star reviews for the Truck Cargo Simulator, one noted his device slowed down after it forced him to download an app that wasn't the game itself. Many simply called it a scam.
Android. Shitty operating system.
Google Play. Shitty curation of applications.
Windows mobile. Discontinued.
iOS. Limited operating system.
A strange game.
The only winning move is
not to play.
Hah! Google and it's Walled Garden have ensnared a half a million people!
oh . . . wait . . .
I don't know who this guy Brewster that wrote TFA is, but he clearly knows nothing about the subject. He lets the other guy - Stefanko get away with a statement about Google not scanning apps uploaded to the Play Store for viruses, then goes on and editorially adds that Google has Virus Total and could scan apps. But of course anyone who knows anything about the subject knows that they DO scan apps. They have for years. The issue isn't scanning. It is that people keep coming up with dodges that evade the scanning and then the scanning engines have to get updated to deal with the new malware. This is just another instance of that.
But keep writing your security blog Mr. Brewster. Maybe someday you'll learn about what you write about.
DEEZ NUTS!!!!
Dog bites man
Water is wet
Trump Lies
The Patriots are cheaters
Unlike asshole dickhead Steve Jobs Google's motto is "Don't Be Evil" so you can totally tell they are way more trustworthy than companies with WALLED GARDENS!!!!
I love tacos and malware! Diversity is strength!
and everything on it. If you can't reproducibly build the apks yourself, and install them without Google, that is 'bad' / 'unhappy' enough to be considered badware/unhappyware/malware.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Take an app like MegaN64 (N64 Emulator), perfectly good app for years. You use it, you trust it. Then one day it auto updates, only the update is infected with malware. Despite the recent poor reviews and warnings, despite reporting it to Google, the app is still available.
I admit, I skimmed through TFA, but.. I think I got the gist of.. it "doesn't seem to do anything", and the "device slows down". Lot's of "it could be doing this, or it could be doing that"
I mean, no doubt there's some form of Malice behind this, but it's not really a perfect example of a security researcher reporting on something specific. I want details man! I mean if the app were able to download APKs on it's own, is this primarily affecting poorly configured (and probably rooted) devices? Or is it "forcing users" to install APKs because they are full screen adds that look like legitimate application functionality? Because in my opinion, the two things are very, very different. The second is a thing many folks do with varying levels of danger (such as avast using full page advertisements that look exactly like the google play store, behind notifications like "we've scanned your device, here's what you need to know"
In the case of the second, you might be mislead in some way to think you're doing something, but inevitably Android is going to ask if you want to install this, and provide these permissions... And if it's not, I would have expected the researcher to provide more details.. (such as there is a new android exploit some folks are taking advantage of, by disguising malware as games, and this is what the exploit actually does.
I wholeheartedly agree however, the google play is filled with 95% shit. But anyways, this isn't news, people report shit apps under suspicion like this all the time. Unless it's just a smear campaign targeting the one developer mentioned with 10 broken games...
Honestly, its a bigger problem vendors are packing software like the facebook app with the device, in a way that it can't be removed...
Motorola EZX Linux. The what now? Discontinued.
I was lucky enough to own an EZX phone. Still works today, though changes in wireless bands makes it less useful. Apps were easy to write and it was a nice system to use.
I don't see any confirmation of the claims being made here. Some user saying it must be malware because his phone slowed way down? Users blame all manner of expected behavior on malware when they don't understand what is going on. Perhaps the games work on the developers system but fail on other phones with different hardware and/or Android versions. Until someone actually analyses it and confirms I will withhold judgement.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
a few years ago, I bought some ios apps as I was thinking of becoming an app developer - most of the purchases were good, but one, an F16 flight sim was strange in that it seemed to be very unfinished (no enemies) - the ipad did do strange things while that app was installed, the weirdest being: I opened up the ipad and saw it auto-type in my 4 digit login code - I promptly deleted the offending app
one developer called Luiz Pinto
Isn't "Pinto" Portuguese for a dick ?
Whaddya mean it's fake? I went for a nice simulated drive with a Nigerian Prince in the countryside.
Table-ized A.I.
In your IMPERSONATIONS of me (like u do now) saying what you thought "makes me look bad" e.g. https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... (like now)? You did me a favor & got me to look @ these closely:
1st - Hosts stop portsmash (blocking downloads of it) "You basically have to already be able to run your own evil code on a machine in order to PortSmash it." from https://www.theregister.co.uk/...
2nd hosts MAY prevent the OTHER forms of Intel CPU weakness per ACADEMIC RESEARCH I read:
SPECTRE "As an attempted mitigation for our JavaScript-based attack" https://spectreattack.com/spec...
MELTDOWN "We presented Meltdown, a novel software-based attack" https://meltdownattack.com/mel...
So like portsmash?
Academics NEEDED LOCAL CODE (like portsmash hosts can prevent) so hosts ALSO work vs. Spectre/Meltdown!
APK
P.S.=> 3rd strike "yer out" - U FAIL PORTFILTERING TESTS https://yro.slashdot.org/comme... (IF hosts could DO it I'd implement it in my work & I STOP THAT ERROR) ... apk
Nor can Apple's. How many white hat hackers penetrated the walled garden and got away with it? All of them.
I would not say all, because you cannot know how many attempts were stopped at review stage.
Furthermore, there have been a number of instances where something with a problem did make it through, but Apple withdrew it. Those were not "self-reported".
But on top of that iOS has long been simply a better environment to accidentally download a malicious app into... for what harm could it do? It was going to have to access your permission for anything interesting (and this is the important bit) AT TIME OF ACCESS, not in a blob up front as Android did for so long (I think they have sort of fixed that recently).
A rogue IOS app isn't going to be able to make or monitor calls or texts without you manually helping it. There are whole classes of malware that simply never have and cannot exist on iOS that work just fine on Android.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No mention if the Google Play Store was listing the game as a "trusted app". This may just be imbeciles that rooted their phones and got what they deserved for running "free games".