If you own a smartphone and tend to browse through android apps on a daily basis to find something interesting for you to try out, you may just want to hold on for a bit to your downloading spree. According to a BlogSpot by Palto Alto networks, a firm which specialises in protection against cyber attacks, the chances of your next downloaded app being infected with malware is really high.
Apparently, there are more than 132 android apps, that is used by users on a daily basis, that have been affected by this malware attack. Some of these apps have more than 10,000 installs and they all have been infected with tiny IFrames that links to harmful domains in their local HTML pages.
If you are going to curse the web developers for bringing up this menace, you might want to hold on because the report is certain that they are victims themselves. The company suggests that chances are app development platforms themselves have been infected by this malware and thus without any knowledge of them, it has managed to seep into their apps.
These infected apps only require permission by the user to use the internet which is kind of default for any apps and users don't usually set to security parameters for that on their phone. Once they get the permission, they are focussed on two activities i.e., to load interstitial advertisements and loading the main application, which in turn renders the smart phone almost useless.
These 132 infected apps in question are seemingly unrelated and have been developed by seven different developers but there is a common thread among all of them - the geographical location of all seven of them are connected to Indonesia. The cyber security firm said that they had reported their findings to Google and these 132 apps have been taken down, but the damage they have done is quite substantial.
