There is a new malware family named ‘’Badnews’’ that has been prowling on Google’s play store. The malware has already been downloaded millions of times and can be found in 32 apps across four different developer accounts as reported by Lookout.
This new breed of malware was exposed by Lookout which provides security software for Smartphones. The malware hides itself as an advertising network being used by apps.
In the event that the malware is installed, it is capable of sending fake news and notifications to users with an aim of getting them to install additional malicious software.Moreover, it is capable of capturing and conveying hardware information such as the IMEI number of the phone. This information is in turn sent back to the malware creators.
By the time we were writing this post, the 32 affected apps had been pulled down out of Google play store while the combined affected applications have been downloaded between 2,000,000 – 9,000,000 times.
