These days malware attacks on stock app stores are increasing abnormally. A few days ago the Google Play Store faced some serious issues with the Joker malware. Now the attack is on Huawei. Huawei App Gallery infected by the Cynos trojan that steals your info.
Huawei actually became the victim of a malware campaign. It was a massive attack. The trojan silently infected almost 190 apps on Huawei App Gallay. Surprisingly those apps are so popular that the malware got installed 9,000,300 times.
The malware was detected as “Android.Cynos.7.Origin”. This trojan can do different malicious activities. It is a modified and integrated version of Cynos trojan which was founded in 2014. This one can be more powerful than you think. It can send SMSes.
Spying on your texts is its special ability. Besides that, it can send premium SMS and interrupt receiving texts. According to malware analysts, some variants can download and install unwanted apps. One characteristic of this trojan matches with the Joker malware. That is, both of them can subscribe to premium services without your concern.
This insane activity can make your account empty and you wouldn’t have any idea how it happened. The trojans detected in Huawei App Gallery collect your information and upload them to a selected server. The information includes your phone number, texts, device specs, Infos, and others.
As we can not enlist all the 190 apps we can mention the majority of downloads that spread the malware on a large scale. Most numbers of the installations came from three apps. A Chinese app called “Hurry Up and Hide” was installed 20,00,000 times. “Cat Adventure” and “Dive School Simulator” were installed 427,000 and 142,000 times respectively.
Initially, Huawei was completely unaware of this. A researcher named Dr. Webb detected the malware first. He contacted Huawei to inform them of the issue. Dr.Webb also helped them to identify and remove the harmful apps.
How to identify Cynos trojan?
If an infected app is already installed on your device, you have to uninstall it manually. The list of the infected apps is too long to explain. So you can use a good antivirus tool for security checkups. That will easily identify and remove any variant of Cynos trojan.
You can also use your intelligence to detect potentially risky apps. They will ask for unnecessary permissions. Let me explain. A simulator game should not have any business with your location service, phone calls, or camera. So if an app asks for irrelevant and unnecessary permissions that can be harmful.
Sometimes it happens that you love an arcade game and you have to accept all permissions in order to play that one. You should leave those games behind if you want to keep yourself protected.
Always check the details before accepting permission from unknown apps. The malware starts working as soon as you install and open the app. From now on you need to be extremely careful about your official app store’s apps.