Fake anti-virus disguises used by Android malware

The Android malware threat is growing.

As financially-motivated cybercriminals realise there’s a real opportunity to make money, so we are seeing more attacks created and distributed which target Android devices.

And it’s no surprise to see similar social engineering tricks that have worked on other operating systems in the past also being used on the Android platform.

Like fake anti-virus, for instance.

As our friends at GFI described earlier this week, criminals spammed out links via Twitter pointing to webpages that contained a rogue app posing as a legitimate virus scanner.

SophosLabs researcher Vanja Svajcer investigated the case, and discovered the .ru domains pointed to the same IP address hosted in Ukraine.

When visited, the webpages determine whether it would be more appropriate to serve up a Java ME .jar file (for phones which are…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.

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