Bypasses malicious app security system and was downloaded more than 10,000 times

The application under consideration is a device for photographing food and creating an alarm. An alert was issued by Predo, a company specializing in mobile security, and the app was removed from the Google Play store on 18 January.

According to Predio, the application managed to bypass the Play Protect scanning engine by hiding malicious code inside an encrypted file in a folder named 0OO00l111l1l. To gauge the sophistication of the system, the application was able to know if it was running on an emulator, so it would not run the code inside that folder, so it would not be easily searchable.

In addition, the application is related to Joker, a malware found in over 1700 applications on Google Play, which has also been removed.

The Daily Food Diary sought some very peculiar permission when it started, running in the background and started when the cell phone was on, so that its data collection operations were never interrupted. The application continuously asked to access the contacts available on the device and even manage the call, rejecting any incoming calls so as not to interrupt their operation.

If you have a daily food diary installed on your phone, it is highly recommended that you remove it immediately.