ESET has uncovered another campaign targeting the Google Play Store and Android devices, in which attackers are once again disguising adware within apps to make them appear legitimate.
This technique is by no means new, and cybercriminals don’t seem to be trying to change their ways much in the near future.
As has often been the case in the past, apps that have been influenced by the success of other apps tend to contain something dubious, and that was the case with three apps: cheats for Pou, Cheats for Subway, and Guide for SubWay, ESET reports.
These three apps contained malware that displayed full-screen interstitial ads every 30 or 45 minutes.
The apps included various safeguards to help them get past Google’s Bouncer app control system, as well as to prevent other malware from running in the simulated environment.
ESET researchers managed to trick it anyway, using the simple trick of restarting the virtual environment. This exposed the malware and allowed ESET engineers to monitor its behavior so they could identify similar infections.
The three apps have been reported to Google, and all three compromised apps were removed from the Play Store.
Below is a simple image to show you how to remove the apps from your Android device, if you were careless enough to install them.
