Friday, January 10, 2020
Kaspersky researchers detected a Trojan application that terrorizes users with unsolicited ads and boosts installations of online shopping applicationsfooling both users and advertisers. This malicious app visits smartphone app stores, downloads and launches applications and leaves fake reviews on behalf of the user, all while hiding itself from the device owner.
Shoppers often rely heavily on reviews, while retailers use them to guide their promotion and advertising budgets. As it turns out, neither can fully trust what they see online, as a new Trojan application is boosting popular shopping app ratings and installations, and spreading numerous ads that may annoy users.
The Trojan, dubbed ‘Shopper,’ first drew the attention of researchers following its extensive obfuscation and use of the Google Accessibility Service. The service enables users to set a voice to read out app content and automate interaction with the user interface – designed to help people with disabilities. However, in the hands of attackers, this feature presents a serious threat to the device owner.
Once it has the permission to use the service, the malware can gain almost unlimited opportunities to interact with the system interface and applications. It can capture data featured on the screen, press buttons and even emulate user gestures. It is not known yet how the malicious application is being spread, however Kaspersky researchers assume that it may be downloaded by device owners from fraudulent ads or third-party app stores while trying to get a legitimate application. The app masks itself as a system application and uses a system icon named ConfigAPKs in order to hide itself from the user. After the screen is unlocked, the app launches, gathers information about the victim’s device and sends it to the attacker’s servers. The server returns the commands for the application to execute. Depending on the commands, the app can:
The highest share of users infected by Trojan-Dropper.AndroidOS.Shopper.a from October to November 2019 was in Russia, with a staggering 28.46% of all users affected by the shopaholic app located in the country. Almost a fifth (18.70%) of infections were in Brazil and 14.23% in India.
“Despite the fact that, at the moment, the real danger stemming from this malicious app is limited to unsolicited ads, fake reviews and ratings issued in the name of the victim, no one can guarantee that the creators of this malware will not change their payload to something else,” said Igor Golovin, Kaspersky malware analyst. “For now, the focus of this malicious app is on retail, but its capabilities enable attackers to spread fake information via users’ social media accounts and other platforms. For example, it could automatically share videos containing whatever the operators behind Shopper would want on personal pages of users’ accounts and just flood the internet with unreliable information.”
Kaspersky products successfully detect and block the Shopper malware under the following detection name: Trojan-Dropper.AndroidOS.Shopper. Read more about the Shopper on Securelist.com.