As the stories keep coming about malicious apps finding their way onto Google’s Play Store, one serious concern is the increasingly sophisticated efforts made by those apps to hide their intent from users. Well, the latest report from the team at Sophos has found 15 harmful apps that have gone a stage further. literally “hiding their apps icons in the launcher… or disguising themselves in the phone’s App settings page.”
Apps have been found that trick users into installing them to perform a trial service. The app disappears from view, but it is actually running, disguised under a system name, making it impossible to detect and stop without effort. Users are urged to specifically root these apps out, stop them, then delete them completely.
If the apps aren’t seen, then they won’t trigger user concerns and they become much more difficult to casually delete without making the effort to find them. That’s the theory. But now those apps have been exposed. Users have been warned.
