Symantec has identified a new malware called Android.Dropdialer in the official Google Play market. The threat was posted as two popular titles, “Super Mario Bros” and “GTA 3 Moscow City,” on June 24 and since then have generated between 50,000 and 100,000 downloads.
It’s kinda scary to think that these two apps managed to stay on Google Play for such a long time, clocking up some serious download figures before being discovered. The trick savvy hackers used to fool Google’s system was to offer just one (clean) part of the app for download via Google Play. Once installed, the application asked to download the second part, hosted on Dropbox, which sends SMS messages to a premium-rate number. Furthermore, to make things worse, this secondary payload prompts to uninstall itself after sending out the premium SMS messages, hiding its true intent in the process. Pretty damn smart when you think about it. Of course, we hope your phone wasn’t affected…