A fake Dubsmash application, which is actually a porn clicker Trojan, has been uploaded to the Google Play Store—again.
According to ESET, this same piece of malware has been uploaded to the app store at least nine times in the form of various fake Dubsmash apps, resulting in tens of thousands of installs. It has also found that there are another 51 Trojan porn clickers out there as well: Four of them had more than 10,000 installs and one of them had more than 50,000 installs. Download Manager, Pou 2, Clash of Clans 2, Subway surfers 2, Subway surfers 3, Minecraft 3, Hay Day 2, and various game cheats and video downloaders are being infected with the same Trojan clicker. The malicious apps pretend to be arcade games like Flappy Birds Family, board games or system applications, and don’t add an app icon to the desktop.
So let’s do the math: That means 60 different Trojan clicker applications have been available from Google Play—which together were downloaded at least 210,000 times in the last three months. Google has removed the apps, but it’s likely only a matter of time before more are uploaded: The apps are managing to evade Google’s Bouncer malware filter.
“Even though the malicious applications were available for download for at most a week, tens of thousands of people still installed them,” ESET said in a blog post. “Hopefully, Google is doing its best to fix this issue and find a way to prevent the developers of these porn clickers from publishing them to the Play Store. To reduce the risk from malicious apps that may have slipped through Google’s filtering, we advise Play Store customers to take careful note of reviews by other customers, and to ensure that their security software is kept up to date.”