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Google Play apps with 1.5 million downloads drained batteries and slowed devices
The apps—a notepad app called "Idea Note: OCR Text Scanner, GTD, Color Notes" and a fitness app with the title "Beauty Fitness: daily workout, best HIIT coach"—carried out the stealthy form of fraud for almost a year until it was discovered by researchers at security firm Symantec. Google removed them from Play after receiving a private report.
The newly discovered tactic positioned advertisements in places that weren't visible to end users—specifically in messages displayed in the nether regions of an infected phone's notification drawer. When a user clicked on the notification, Android's Toast class opened the ad—but in a way that wasn't visible to the user. The technique worked by opening a Canvas and using the translate() and dispatchDraw() methods to position the ads beyond the viewable screen area of the infected device. The result: the app could report a revenue-generating ad click even though users saw nothing.
Another way the apps concealed the ad-clicking was through the use of so-called packers. By changing the entire structure and flow of an APK, such packers can obfuscate the true behavior of an Android app. That makes it hard for Google scanners to detect malicious apps during any vetting processes.
(Score: 2) by progo on Sunday September 01 2019, @08:01PM (2 children)
AFAICT, Android's and IOS's walled garden stores have a financial barrier to entry. If they did not -- if kids could package free software web apps as "apps" without paying and registering with a gatekeeper, the app stores wouldn't be full of malicious software.
(Score: 4, Informative) by inertnet on Sunday September 01 2019, @09:59PM
F-Droid is free, open source and most apps are ad free (some apps have warnings 'this app has features you may not like' before you download them).
(Score: 3, Informative) by hendrikboom on Sunday September 01 2019, @10:41PM
Yes, there is a financial barrier to getting an app on the playstore.
It's a one-time fee of $25 for the developer.
They take a percentage if you want to sell it.
That's zero for a free game. But if you release it for free, apparently you aren't allowed to charge for it later. Once free, always free.