Google has removed 25 Android Apps from the Google Play Store after they were found stealing Facebook credentials. The 25 apps had a total of 2.34 million downloads among them.
A French cybersecurity firm Evina claimed that it found 25 apps which included Step Counters, image editors, mobile games, wallpaper apps, flashlight applications, and more. All these apps had regular functionality, features, and operations but in the background stole Facebook data.
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According to Evina, in the foreground, they had a legitimate functionality but also had a malicious code written in them.
When the user opened the app to use it they had to log in using Facebook. While doing so the code came into play. A fake Facebook Login page would be opened where the credentials would also be copied to. This data would then be sent to a remote server domain- airshop.pw domain.
This worked very efficiently as users seemed to fill the details on the Facebook App, however, they were also giving their Facebook credentials to these malicious databases.
The list of 25 apps that have been removed from Google Play Store:
- Super Wallpapers Flashlight
- Padenatef
- Wallpaper Level
- Contour level wallpaper
- iplayer & iwallpaper
- Video maker
- Color Wallpapers
- Pedometer
- Powerful Flashlight
- Super Bright Flashlight
- Super Flashlight
- Solitaire
- Accurate scanning of QR code
- Classic card game
- Junk file cleaning
- Synthetic Z
- File Manager
- Composite Z
- Screenshot capture
- Daily Horoscope Wallpapers
- Wuxia Reader
- Plus Weather
- Anime Live Wallpaper
- iHealth step counter
- com.tyapp.fiction
Amongst these, the most popular apps include Super Wallpapers Flashlight and Padenatef which were downloaded over 500,000 times on the Google Play Store. While most others have been downloaded about 100,000 times.
Evina reportedly sent this report to Google back in May and after verifying this claim, Google removed these apps from the Play Store a few days back. Google has been trying to make the Play Store more secure by regularly removing such malicious apps, but still, such apps do make their way into the Google Play Store.
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