Hundreds of Android Apps Tires Together in the massive scam campaign aimed at millions – this is what we know
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- Apps would hide on a device as soon as they are installed to prevent removal
- They would serve unwanted advertisements for unwanted, advertisements to victims
- The apps were removed from the gaming store
An important advertising fraud campaign that hundreds of Android Applications have been discovered and dismantled, security researchers have said people.
The Iconads campaign worked by displaying advertisements without the correct context, or user state -and to make things worse, as soon as the apps were installed on an Android device, they would hide their icons from users, making it more difficult to find and remove it.
In total, the campaign had 352 Android apps, and during peak activity it had 1.2 billion bid requests a day, the researchers said.
Smuggle
We do not know how many devices the apps have been installed, but we do know that they have succeeded in sneaking past the defense of Google and in the Google Play StoreAnd most of the traffic came from Brazil, Mexico and the United States.
This has now been remedied and these apps have been removed. However, it is safe to assume that new ones will soon arise: “Many Iconad-associated apps have a short shelf life before they are removed from the playing store,” said human researchers.
“With the various evolutions of this threat, researchers expect continuous adjustment, published with new apps and added new obfuscation techniques.”
The campaign has been active since at least 2019, when the first apps were uploaded to the app repository.
The mobile app store of Google is generally considered safe. However, its defense is not impenetrable, and every now and then malignant apps come through, at least for a short time.
For that reason, users should never trust apps blindly, even when they come from such a renowned source. Instead, they must always find it downloading and user reviews. Newly released apps with fewer downloads have a greater chance of being malignant, and many cyber criminals falsify user reviews, so it is important to read them carefully. Nowadays most of them are generated by AI and sound superficial and faint, and user accounts have generic names, often comparable to each other.
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