Trojanized Android apps flood third-party stores, compromise phones

Attackers are creating rogue versions of popular Android applications that compromise the security of devices and are extremely hard to remove.

Researchers from mobile security firm Lookout have found more than 20,000 samples of such trojanized apps. They’re typically fully functional copies of top Android applications like Candy Crush, Facebook, Google Now, NYTimes, Okta, SnapChat, Twitter or WhatsApp, but with malicious code added to them.

The goal of these rogue apps is to aggressively display advertisements on devices. A scary development though is that, unlike traditional adware, they root the devices where they get installed in order to prevent users from removing them.

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Network World Security