Barcode Scanner, with 10 million downloads, contains a Trojan that displays ads in the browser

Malwarebytes has detected a new Trojan in ‘Barcode Scanner’, one of the applications for scanning barcodes with the most installations in the Google Play Store. With more than 10 million installations, Google has immediately removed this app, although users who have it installed are advised to remove it immediately.

But how could there be more than 10 million installs of a malicious application? Here comes the most curious point: the app code was clean, until a trojan was introduced via a new update.

An update to Barcode Scanner has turned it into a malicious app

Barcode Scanner had more than 10 million installs and an average rating of 4.4 stars on Google Play. In fact, was one of the first applications that appeared when writing ‘barcode reader’. On December 4, the application was updated, and the Malwarebytes team has detected malware in this update.

In the case of this app added code that was not present in previous versions, using obfuscation to avoid detection. Originally, the Malwarebytes team detected that the application had adware, but after the update a Trojan was directly detected.

Regarding the behavior of the app after the update, displayed ads in the phone’s own browser, linking to misleading pages and applications to “clean” the phone. The Malwarebytes team reported the malware and Google quickly removed it from the app store, so Google Play Protect already detects it as a malicious app (although it was unable to do so at the time).

More information | Malwarebytes

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The news

Barcode Scanner, with 10 million downloads, contains a Trojan that displays ads in the browser

was originally published in

Xataka Android

by
Ricardo Aguilar

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