ESET researchers have discovered more than 80 malicious applications that “disguise» as mods for Minecraft, tallying nearly a million installations in the official app store.
Recently Minecraft was linked to a scareware campaign, and again today, ESET researchers report another case of abuse of the popular application.
As stated in the official analysis on the Welivesecurity.com page of ESET, there are 87 fake Minecraft mods on Google Play, which target players of this game who use the Android platform, harassing them with aggressive ads and scam. So far, approximately 990,000 users have installed these fake mods.
The researchers at ESET have divided the malicious activity associated with fake mods for Minecraft into two main categories: the downloaders, which display ads and are detected by ESET as Android/TrojanDownloader.Agent.JL, and the fake applications, which redirect users to scam websites, and are detected by ESET as Android/FakeApp.FG.
As for Android/TrojanDownloader.Agent.JL, ESET reports 14 fake apps masquerading as Minecraft mods, with up to 80,000 installations. Since these fake mod apps are only responsible for displaying aggressive ads, bad reviews are common.
As for Android/FakeApp.FG, ESET reports 73 cases with redirects to scam websites, counting 910,000 installations, in the period between January and March 2017. Once installed, the apps display a screen with a download button. Clicking the button does not download any mod; instead, the user is redirected to a website that opens in a browser and displays every type of annoying content.
“To avoid being scammed by fake apps and malware, always choose official app download stores,” reminds users, Lukáš Štefanko , Malware Researcher at ESET .
«Be especially careful when downloading apps from third‑party manufacturers that offer additional features to existing apps. It also helps to check how popular an app is by the number of installations, the ratings, and, most importantly, the content of the reviews – in the case of these particular apps, low ratings and angry comments should be a fairly good indicator of their unreliability».
The full analysis of fake Minecraft mods on Google Play is available at WeLiveSecurity.com.
