An advertising dropper in Google Play

[harlan4096]

Recently, the popular CamScanner – Phone PDF creator app caught our attention. According to Google Play, it has been installed more than 100 million times. The developers position it as a solution for scanning and managing digitized documents, but negative user reviews that have been left over the past month have indicated the presence of unwanted features.

After analyzing the app, we saw an advertising library in it that contains a malicious dropper component. Previously, a similar module was often found in preinstalled malware on Chinese-made smartphones. It can be assumed that the reason why this malware was added was the app developers’ partnership with an unscrupulous advertiser.

Kaspersky solutions detect this malicious component as Trojan-Dropper.AndroidOS.Necro.n. We reported to Google company about our findings, and the app was promptly removed from the Google Play.

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