Cyber security experts recently found a pirate application masquerading as a well-known application.
Hackers are full of ideas, each more ingenuous than the last. Their end goal generally remains the same: to compromise and steal your personal data. However, their methods continue to evolve and diversify in order to deceive you. Among the techniques most often used in recent years, pretending to be someone you know is generally very effective. The victim will trust the hacker thinking they are talking to a close relative or friend and easily fall into his trap.
But it is also possible that hackers are not imitating those around you, but an application that is just as familiar to you! A scourge that returns regularly every year with all kinds of clones of popular applications. These copycats imitate the official application almost perfectly and rely on these similarities to encourage you to download them.
Once a pirate clone is installed on your smartphone, it will generally trigger several unwanted operations that are dangerous for your personal information and your security. This is particularly the case with a recent pirate application spotted by cybersecurity experts from AG Data.
These experts recently discovered an application that almost perfectly imitates Google Chrome, the famous browser launched in 2008 and subsequently adapted into an application. This clone app includes a large part of the options and functionalities of the real Google Chrome, with a few exceptions: once installed, the pirate application is capable of hijacking your phone’s permissions to make calls and read your SMS without your consent . The data thus collected is then sent to different servers located in Russia.
To differentiate this fake application from the original, the researchers notably observed that the clone sent many more notifications than the real Google Chrome. These notifications were usually spam and dubious advertising propositions.
If you feel like you don’t have the real version of Google Chrome on your smartphone, we recommend that you delete recently downloaded apps and go to the Google Play Store (or App Store if you’re using an iPhone) again. to find the real Chrome. The real version notably has more than 10 billion downloads.