Google has removed 25 Android apps that stole Facebook credentials. View the list and remove them from your device immediately.
Mobile devices and cell phones are increasingly emerging as powerful productivity machines, but they are also an important backdoor if you do not manage them properly. A recent example was Google removing 25 Android apps from the Google Play Store at the end of June because they were "caught" stealing credentials on Facebook.
These 25 malicious applications were all built by the same team (Rio Reader LLC) and despite offering different functions, they all worked the same underground. Before being recognized by Google Security and removed, the 25 apps had a total of over 2,34 million downloads.
According to a report by the French security company Evina, applications are presented as step counters, image editors, video editors, wallpaper applications, lens applications, file managers, and mobile games.
The apps offered a legitimate functionality, but they also contained malicious code. Evina researchers say the apps contained code that detects which app a user has recently opened from within the phone's foreground.
If that app was Facebook, the malicious app would overlay a screen of its own on the official Facebook app and load a fake Facebook login page (see image below: blue line = real Facebook app, black line = phishing page).
If users entered their credentials on this phishing site, the malicious application would record them and send them to a remote server located in the airshop.pw domain (which does not work now).
Evina said she found the malware embedded in 25 applications and reported it to Google in late May. Google has removed the dangerous applications after verifying the findings of the French security company. Some of the applications were available in the Play Store for more than a year !!!.
The full list of 25 apps, their names and package ID, are listed below. When Google removes malicious apps from the Google Store, it also disables the apps on the user's devices and notifies them via Play Protect (included in the official Play Store app).
