Illustrative stock photo (source: AP/TASR)
The applications seemed to contain the cheat passwords to popular games, which resulted in them being installed by more than 200,000 users in just one month. The applications in fact showed advertisements every 30-40 minutes, disabling any other use of the mobile phones, the TASR newswire reported.
These false applications, which Eset detected as Android/AdDisplay.Cheastorm, use a technology which they try to hide behind Google Bouncer. This company is used to protect Google Play from sharing malicious codes.
“The applications obtain the IP address of the device at which they are installed and try to get any information about owners of internet domains and IP addresses via a database,” Lukáš Štefanko from Eset said, as quoted by TASR. “If this information contains the word ‘Google’, the application considers it a signal that it is checked by Google Bouncer. In this case they do not show the advertisements, but game cheats.”
The applications Cheats for Pou, Guide for SubWay and Cheats for SubWay have been removed from Google Play after Eset notified the company. It is hard to remove these applications, which was mentioned also by several users who had installed them, Zuzana Hošalová of Eset told TASR.
