Some Play Store apps have been infected with malware designed for Windows
We’ve seen various reports of malware running rampant on our Android devices over the years. Some of us have been affected, while others have been lucky and have yet to be infected. There are sometimes though, where you really start to wonder what in the world some people are thinking.
This is in reference to the latest set of malware found in apps on the Play Store. According to Palo Alto Networks, there were a total of 132 apps found which contained malware on the Play Store. There was just one problem – the malware was designed for Windows.
Recently, we have discovered 132 Android apps on Google Play infected with tiny hidden IFrames that link to malicious domains in their local HTML pages, with the most popular one having more than 10,000 installs alone. Our investigation indicates that the developers of these infected apps are not to blame, but are more likely victims themselves. We believe it is most likely that the app developers’ development platforms were infected with malware that searches for HTML pages and injects malicious content at the end of the HTML pages it finds.
That’s right, someone (or a group of people) went through the trouble of creating a malware, injecting it into various applications, only to have it not work. Unfortunately for the “bad guys”, and fortunate for us, there is no possible way for malware to inject itself into the Android OS, if it’s built and designed for Windows or any other OS.
This may be the most interesting malware to ever hit the airwaves, but at least we know that out smartphones are safe from disaster.