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posted by martyb on Sunday September 01 2019, @05:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the caveat-emptor dept.

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 02 2019, @12:24AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 02 2019, @12:24AM (#888662)

    Again.