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from the here's-looking-at-^W^W-watching-you,-kid dept.
Google has expelled 20 Android apps from its Play marketplace after finding they contained code for monitoring and extracting users' e-mail, text messages, locations, voice calls, and other sensitive data.
The apps, which made their way onto about 100 phones, exploited known vulnerabilities to "root" devices running older versions of Android. Root status allowed the apps to bypass security protections built into the mobile operating system. As a result, the apps were capable of surreptitiously accessing sensitive data stored, sent, or received by at least a dozen other apps, including Gmail, Hangouts, LinkedIn, and Messenger. The now-ejected apps also collected messages sent and received by Whatsapp, Telegram, and Viber, which all encrypt data in an attempt to make it harder for attackers to intercept messages while in transit.
To conceal their surveillance capabilities, the apps posed as utilities for cleaning unwanted files or backing up data. Google said the apps contained evidence that they were developed by a cyber arms company called Equus Technologies. In April, Google officials warned of a different family of Android surveillance apps developed by a different provider of intercept tools called NSO Group Technologies. Those apps were related to the advanced iOS spyware known as Pegasus, which was used against a political dissident located in the United Arab Emirates. In that case, however, the Pegasus-related Android apps never made their way into Google Play.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 02 2017, @04:17AM
Google has a terrible security model that they're using. The permissions are take it or leave it and are generally much broader than they should be. Apps themselves are allowed to opt you in to privacy damaging modes of operation internally unless you specifically opt out. Which is completely backwards, you should have to opt in to sharing things on your profile rather than out.
The sad thing is that it doesn't have to be such a mess, it's just that the developers didn't feel like doing it right. You shouldn't have to grant such wide access to the files on the phone just so that an application can write saves to a folder that's outside of the app's directory. One thing that *NIX get right is that the saves and configuration files are saved separate from the executables, so if you reinstall, you've still got them. But, you don't have to grant permissions for random other programs to access those directories if you don't want to.
I think the worst one is the apps requesting permission to make calls, that's not something that any app should do unless it's an actual dialer app. Any other app should have to specifically request permission every time it wants to call and not be allowed to call until and unless permission is granted.