The Anti-virus Times

Monday, June 20, 2016

Compared with other download sources, mobile application stores are deemed to be the most secure for users. Indeed, popular stores try to prevent malware from penetrating their websites by scanning vendor installation packages. As a result, the risk of getting infected with a Trojan is far less than on any file sharing site; it’s no coincidence that those sites are referred to as “scrap heaps”.

Unfortunately, only a pathologist can give a full warranty―and, in this case, the “pathologist” is the employee at the service center to which you bring your infected mobile device for cross-flashing or the virus analyst helping to investigate how your device got infected.

How is it that users can download Trojans even from Google Play? The reasons are many.

• Virus writing is a business. Day in and day out, cybercriminals are grinding out Trojans. It’s likely that the store administrations simply don’t have enough qualified specialists on staff to thoroughly check all the applications.
• Mobile applications are enormously abundant, and many of them are free of charge. Cybercriminals just take an application, modify it, add malicious features, and locate it in the applications catalogue. They mark it as “free” so that users who maniacally keep tabs on new, free applications immediately download it—particularly, if it’s a game.
• Cybercriminals can have inside knowledge of what anti-virus is being used to scan applications, allowing them to test their applications in advance to see whether they can bypass detection.
• Cybercriminals can design their malicious programs to remain inactive for a certain period of time after they’ve been installed or while they’re being tested under certain conditions. Programs determined by testing to be potentially dangerous are a dime a dozen.
• Sometimes malicious code can be absent in a program located in a store. Most Trojans install additional malware only after they penetrate a system…

And this list is far from complete.

And what do you think? Why do users download infected applications from Google Play so often?