If you are among the more than 100 million Android users worldwide who have downloaded the CamScanner app from the Google Play Store, uninstall it immediately. According to researchers at Kaspersky Labs, the app, in fact, contains a malware, precisely a dangerous trojan.
CamScanner: A new dangerous app in the Play Store
According to Igor Golovin and Anton Kivva of Kaspersky, CamScanner was actually a harmless app for years. But lately, one of the advertising packages contains a library that silently retrieves and runs spyware. Alongside with other malware, including a trojan known as Necro.n. The latter in itself does not actually perform any malicious activity on its own. Such as spying on users or the collection of data. But would act as a downloader for other modules that then do the dirty work.
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“Kaspersky products detect this module as Trojan-Dropper.AndroidOS.Necro.n, which we have observed in some apps preinstalled on Chinese smartphones. As the name suggests, the module is a Trojan Dropper. That means the module extracts and runs another malicious module from an encrypted file included in the appâs resources. This âdroppedâ malware, in turn, is a Trojan Downloader that downloads more malicious modules depending on what its creators are up to at the moment.” Kaspersky researchers explained.
According to Kaspersky, the CamScanner developers may not even be aware of the presence of malware in their app. Kaspersky researchers examined a recent version of the app and found the malicious module there. then they reported them findings to Google, and the app was promptly removed from Google Play.
It is worth to mention that recently, a new scandal for Google and Android on the use of private data has appeared. More than a 1,000 applications have managed to circumvent the prohibitions of access to certain data to harvest them.
Great app!