ANDROID owners have been warned over two new strains of malware that are stealing people’s passwords via 31 different apps.
These malicious apps aren’t exclusive to the Google Play Store, as they’re also being distributed on social media, such as YouTube, Twitter, and Telegram.
The two new Android malware families are named CherryBlos and FakeTrade, and were discovered on the Google Play Store by cybersecurity firm Trend Micro.
According to Trend Micro, the CherryBlos malware has been around since April.
The pair have been injected inside tens of apps, masquerading as shopping and money-making apps, as well as ones that are impersonating real-life businesses and ChatGPT.
Luckily, the apps have only been downloaded a few thousand times combined, before they were removed by Google.
However, if you have one of these apps on your phone, you must delete it manually – or your passwords will be at risk, if they haven’t been stolen already.
CherryBlos employs a number of different tactics to steal passwords, according to TrendMicro.
The main technique is to use fake overlays which appear on top of legitimate banking and crypto apps.
So instead of typing in details to access their accounts, victims are unknowingly plugging in their passwords and sending them straight to fraudsters.
Hackers are also using optical character recognition (OCR) – the technology used in PDF editors – to steal passwords from screenshots in victims’ photo albums.
Here’s the list of all of the 28 scam apps distributing the Faketrade malware:
Here are the apps carrying the CherryBlos malware:
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