Cerberus banking Trojan discovered in Google Play Store
Presenting itself as a currency converter app, it targets users in Spain and has been downloaded over 10 times
(Read more)
Google Play is an application store created by Google on March 6, 2012 by merging the Android Market, Google Movies, Google ebookstor and Google Music services. Wikipedia
The Cerberus trojan has the particularity of extracting one-time codes and sending them to an external server.
Un Trojan horse (Trojan Horse in English) is a type of malware, often confused with viruses or other parasites. The Trojan horse is software that appears legitimate, but contains malware. The role of the Trojan horse is to bring this parasite onto the computer and install it there without the user's knowledge. The contained program is called the "payload". It can be any type of parasite: virus, keylogger, spyware. It is this parasite, and it alone, which will execute actions within the victim computer. The Trojan horse is nothing other than the vehicle, the one that “brings the wolf into the fold”. This software is not harmful in itself because it does not perform any action other than allowing the installation of the real parasite. In their cyberattacks, hackers can use the trojan payload to install ransomware.
Security researchers have discovered the Cerberus banking Trojan disguised as a legitimate currency app on Google Play.
On Tuesday, Avast's cybersecurity team said the malicious app in question posed as a legitimate currency conversion app designed for Spanish users. (Read more)