There’s another fresh warning for Android smartphone owners and ignoring it will prove costly. The latest alert comes via the security experts at Kaspersky who discovered 11 popular apps that all contain something called a subscription Trojan. Once installed, this nasty bug can hide away on a device and stealthy sign unsuspecting users up for expensive monthly subscriptions without them ever knowing.
“Affected users often fail to discover the unwanted subscriptions right away, let alone find out how they happened in the first place. All this makes subscription Trojans a reliable source of illegal income in the eyes of cybercriminals," Kaspersky's Dmitry Kalinin explained.
It’s a serious issue especially as the apps in question are thought to have been downloaded over 615,000 times. After finding out about the danger, all of the rogue applications were instantly removed from the Play Store but that won’t help anyone who has already installed them.
If you have any of the apps listed below on your device, the advice is simple… delete them immediately and check your accounts for any signs of payments that you have not authorised.
Dangerous apps - delete these 11 applications now
• Beauty Camera Plus (com.beauty.camera.plus.photoeditor)
• Beauty Photo Camera (com.apps.camera.photos)
• Beauty Slimming Photo Editor (com.beauty.slimming.pro)
• Fingertip Graffiti (com.draw.graffiti)
• GIF Camera Editor (com.gif.camera.editor)
• HD 4K Wallpaper (com.hd.h4ks.wallpaper)
• Impressionism Pro Camera (com.impressionism.prozs.app)
• Microclip Video Editor (com.microclip.vodeoeditor)
• Night Mode Camera Pro (com.urox.opixe.nightcamreapro)
• Photo Camera Editor (com.toolbox.photoeditor)
• Photo Effect Editor (com.picture.pictureframe)
It’s thought that the majority of users affected by this trojan were based in areas such as Thailand, Poland, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore although there have been reports across the whole globe.
Speaking about the latest batch of dangerous apps, Kalinin added: "Our data suggests that the Trojan has been active since 2022. We have found eleven Fleckpe-infected apps on Google Play, which have been installed on more than 620,000 devices. All of the apps had been removed from the marketplace by the time our report was published but the malicious actors might have deployed other, as yet undiscovered, apps, so the real number of installations could be higher."
This latest alert comes after another 38 apps were recently removed by Google after they were discovered to include annoying adware.
