Google’s Play Store is constantly under attack from increasingly resourceful villains, and despite the search giant’s efforts to protect Android users worldwide from all manner of threats to their most sensitive information, another malicious app has reportedly made it through lately, Chaos to prepare.
What is the app and how concerned should you be?
Posing as an innocent and helpful “battery saver and phone booster,” Fast Cleaner garnered over 50,000 installs before Google finally realized the app’s true intentions. Thanks to an age-old tactic that injected a brand new banking Trojan into the Android devices of unsuspecting users across the old continent to steal login credentials and intercept text messages and notifications, without anyone ever noticing anything fishy.
What can you do to avoid danger?
Obviously, the first thing to do is to uninstall Fast Cleaner right away if you made the mistake of trusting its “battery saver” and performance boosting intentions from the start.
The Xenomorph malware is primarily targeting European banks…at the moment.
To be absolutely clear, the malicious app analyzed by ThreatFabric was allegedly created by “ilzeeva4”, which is probably not a real developer anyway, and you can no longer find it in the Play Store.
Unfortunately, simply deleting the app might not be enough to get rid of the threat as sneaky lines of code might be left behind to continue gathering financial data. A good extra security measure would be to contact your bank or simply check your bank statements for unauthorized transactions and, perhaps more importantly, change your passwords, PIN numbers, etc. frequently.
Two-factor authentication with a second device, like a spare phone or a computer, is a great way to protect your money in general, and as for malicious Android apps, remember to always check user reviews and little-known ones avoid titles and developers that promise you features and functionality that seem too good to be true.
