Hundreds of porn clicker trojans infiltrate Google Play
by Nikola Strahija on February 29th, 2016 On average 10 new porn clickers bypassed Google Play's security checks a week. They did not just made it to the store, they sucessfully infiltrated user devices.
To put things in perspective, each of these porn clickers were downloaded 3600 times on average. Researchers from ESET found 343 malicious porn clicker trojans (Android/Clicker.M) in the last seven months and their numbers keep rising. In one of the largest malware campaigns on the Google's Play store yet, authors keep uploading further variants of these malicious apps and it seems Google is helpless in identifying the app in the approval phase.
The authors of these trojans are betting on the popularity of certain applications - most notably - games. After installation they generate fake banner clicks in order to generate revenue, robbing advertisers and harming ad networks. From the user's perspective, these trojans consume a significant amount of bandwidth and might have negative consequences for users on metered data plans.
It is clear that Google Bouncer filter and Google's human review process cannot keep malicious apps out of the store, considering how widespread these porn clickers have become.
