Joker, the infamous Trojan horse, has again been detected in an innocent Android app, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. Proof that Google does not monitor its store enough …
Really, not a month goes by without reporting a security problem with the Play Store, Google’s application store. The American Internet giant may take precautions, crooks and hackers always find tricks to bypass the protections in place and discreetly infest software. And the latest case is rather embarrassing because it marks the return of a well-known malware, Joker. Circulating for over four years, this very harmful Trojan has even become one of the favorite tools of cybercriminals who skillfully hide it in all kinds of seemingly harmless applications. This time it’s Pradeo, a company specializing in security – founded by the French -, which sounded the alarm bells: as they explain in a post published on their blog on December 16, 2021, its experts have indeed spotted Joker was detected in Color Message, an application for personalizing SMS that has already been downloaded more than 500,000 times from the Google Play Store, claiming as many potential victims. Victims all the less suspicious as Joker works like a Trojan horse, only activating a few days after its installation, even hiding its icon on the home screen so as not to be spotted and deleted …
Color Message: an application infected by Joker to urgently uninstall
In fact, if nothing suspicious appeared when downloading Color Message, Joker then activated discreetly by first siphoning off the victim’s address book. Joker then took care of subscribing its prey to paid services – and surcharged! – by intercepting confirmation SMS. An unstoppable technique for the average user, who could only discover the scam after receiving his obviously expensive phone bill… Once reported by Pradeo, Color Message was of course immediately withdrawn from the Play Store by Google. But if you have downloaded this infected app, delete it right away! This case is all the more unfortunate since Joker has been raging regularly since 2017. It would be high time that Google considered strengthening its security and validation mechanisms by really testing and analyzing all the applications offered on the Play Store to save this kind of disappointment for Android users and prevent them from having their eyes on the apple world …