Play Store faces issues with malicious apps and motives like these don’t help anyone.
alware has been a big problem for Google, and it has found it hard to detect malicious apps every now and then. Now, the company has another issue to tackle, as a new report says that hackers now have the capability to add these malicious apps on Play Store and they do that for as much as $5,000 (Rs 4 lakh approx) but the rate can go up to $20,000 (Rs 16.40 lakh approx).
These hackers are connecting via the Darknet, where they can easily find buyers for these apps, and adding them to the Play Store definitely puts further doubts on how Google restricts or detects such apps from infecting devices.
The details of these infiltrations have been shared by Kaspersky who believes that both Google and the users need to be careful of downloading such apps.
“On Darknet, we found messages from cybercriminals complaining how it is now much harder for them to upload their malicious apps to official stores. However, this also means that they will now come up with much more sophisticated circumvention schemes, so users should stay alert and carefully check which apps they are downloading,” said Alisa Kulishenko, security expert at Kaspersky.
HOW CYBERCRIMINALS PUSH MALICIOUS APPS?
Now that you know the price of getting such apps published on the Play Store, it is time to know the technique and the process of how this is done. Kaspersky says these hackers need an account on Google Play and a downloader code that is malicious.
They have to get a developer account to attempt this hack. Malicious loaders range in price from $2,000 to $20,000, depending on the complexity of the malware, the novelty and prevalence of malicious code, and the additional functions, the report adds.
The higher you go with the price, the hacker can enable higher sophistication which can make it harder to detect the malicious apps. The buyers gets the guarantee of a specific number of downloads and keep the app on the Play Store for a particular number of days/weeks and more.