Popular Android apps that have collectively accumulated over a billion downloads on the Google Play Storehave become a key target of 10 top banking trojans.
See also: Trojan detections on mobile devices have skyrocketed
Banking trojans disguise themselves as seemingly benign applications, such as productivity tools and games , and usually sneak into the Google Play Store, which is the official Android app store.
Once they infect a device, they overlay login pages on top of legitimate banking and financial apps to steal account credentials, monitor notifications to grab OTPs, and even commit financial fraud on the device by abusing Accessibility services to perform actions as the user.
According to a report for the first quarter of 2021, each of these trojans has occupied a unique niche in the market based on the number of organizations it targets as well as the functionality that differentiates it from the rest.
This finding is very concerning, as according to 2021 surveys, three out of four respondents in the US use banking apps to perform their daily banking activities, providing a huge “target pool” for these trojans.
At the top of the list of most targeted countries is the United States, with 121 apps. It is followed by the United Kingdom with 55 apps, Italy with 43, Turkey with 34, Australia with 33 and France with 31.
See also: ERMAC 2.0 Android Trojan: Steals wallet accounts from 467 applications
The trojan that targets the most applications is Teabot, covering 410 out of 639 of them, while Exobot also targets a total of 324 applications.
The most downloaded targeted app is PhonePe, which is very popular in India, having 100 million downloads from the Play Store.
Binance , the popular cryptocurrency exchange , has 50 million downloads. Cash App, a mobile payment service covering the US and UK , also has 50 million installs via the Play Store.
The most widely targeted application is BBVA, a global online banking portal with tens of millions of downloads. This application is targeted by seven of the ten most active banking trojans.
The most prolific banking trojans in the first quarter of this year, according to Zimperium, are the following:
BianLian
Cabassous
Cooper
EventBot
Exobot
FluBot
Medusa
Sharkbot
Teabot
Xenomorph
See also: Fakecalls trojan: Hacks users' calls to bank customer support
To protect against all these threats, keep your device updated, choose a reliable VPN, only install apps from the official Google Play Store, check user reviews, visit the developer , and keep the number of apps installed on your device to a minimum.
