Human Society, a company specializing in computer security, has exposed a long list of fraudulent Android and iOS applications. Once installed, they covertly load a host of advertisements onto your device to generate as much revenue as possible.
Does your Android or iOS smartphone suffer from slowdowns or an abnormal loss of autonomy? You may have installed one of the apps pinned by Human Society cybersecurity researchers. In a long blog post, the company gives the alert concerning no less than 75 Android applications and a dozen iOS applications. The latter are illustrated by a devilishly effective practice that allows them to display in the background, and therefore discreetly, a large number of advertisements to generate maximum revenue, as soon as they are installed.
13 million installs
Installed 13 million times around the world, these mobile applications therefore operate secretly by discreetly launching web pages saturated with advertisements. The publisher of these corrupted solutions then deceives the user as much as the advertising agencies, involved in spite of themselves. As reported by our colleagues from Digital, this practice is not only harmful for the autonomy of the smartphone (abnormally solicited). But it can also inject Trojan horses, thus confronting the user with ever more harmful malware.
Human Society finally explains in its blog post that these fraudulent applications are linked to Poseidon, a vast scam operation in progress since at least 2019. This operation aims to deceive the networks even more deeply by adopting advertising identifiers that refer to the categories of the most profitable applications, such as streaming video platforms.
Here is the list of affected applications on Android and iOS:
- Loot the Castle
- Run Bridge
- Shinning Gun
- Racing Legend 3D
- rope runner
- Wood Sculptor
- Fire wall
- Ninja Critical Hit
- Tony Runs
- Super Hero – Save the world!
- Arrow Coins
- Parking Master
- LadyRun
- Magic Brush 3D
- Shake Shake Sheep
- Number Combination: Colored Chips
- Jackpot Scratcher-Win Real
- Scratch Carnival
- Ztime:Earn cash rewards easily
- Billionaire Scratch
- Lucky Wings – Lotto Scratchers
- Lucky Star: Lotto Scratch
- Shake Shake Pig
- Lucky Money Tree
- run and dance
- Lucky Scratchers: Lotto Card
- Worm Sweater
- Crowd Battle:Fight the bad guys
- Shoot Dummy – Win Rewards & Paypal Cash
- Spot 10 Differences
- Find 5 Differences – New
- Dinosaur Legend
- One Line Drawing
- shoot master
- Talent Trap – NEW
- Shoot it: Using Gun
- Super Flake
- Five-Star Slice
- Sand Drawing
- Mr Dinosaur: Play your Dino
- Track Sliding New
- Beat Kicker New
- Fill Color 3D
- Draw Live
- Draw 1 Stroke
- Fidget Cubes
- GirlsFight
- ninja assassin
- Shooting Puzzle 2020
- Pulley Parkour
- Chop Flake 3D
- Weapon Fantasy
- balloon shooter
- Musical Shoot
- Chop Slices
- Ninja Slice
- Work Now!
- Bottle Jump
- corn scraper
- Idle Wood Maker
- Pop Girls Schooler
- Romy Rush
- Spear Hero
- Dig Road Balls
- BOO Popstar
- Draw CompleteA
- Rush 2048：3D Shoot Cubes
- Meet Camera
- Auto Stamp Camera
- Find Five Differences
- MUFC
- Roll Turn
- Hidden Draw
- Peter Shoot
- Design n Road
- Draw Complete
- Thief King
- Downhill Race
- Draw a War
- Rescue Master
- Spin: Letter Roll
- Helicopter Attack – NEW
- Crush Car
- Relx cash
- War in Painting
- Bike Extreme Racing
- Player Spiral Maker 3D
- Match 3 Tiles
- 2048 Merge Cube – Win Cash
Particularly insidious applications
In 2020, the mechanisms of this fraud had been refined through a first variant of Poseidon called “Charybdis”. The rogue apps we’re talking about today exploit a further enhancement to this scam, dubbed ‘Scylla’. More sophisticated than Charybde, it manages to hide even more effectively bits of its code to operate incognito.
The list of fraudulent applications discovered by Human Society is fully accessible on the firm’s website (source of this article). If you identify any of these applications on your smartphone, delete it without delay.
Sources: Human Security, Digital
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