“If we needed further evidence that any legitimate-looking app has the potential to be mimicked, scammers have even created malicious and riskware versions of holy books. Proofpoint researchers analyzed holy book apps available on iOS and Android app stores and quantified the extent of the risk to users… and their personal and company data,” Proofpoint reports. “A Proofpoint sample of apps available on major app stores found that the Bible is the most popular of the holy book apps: a single Bible app has over 50 million downloads, three registered over five million downloads, and seventeen Bible apps have been each downloaded over one million times.”
Proofpoint reports, “Looking more closely at the apps themselves, Proofpoint analyzed over 5,600 unique Bible apps (4,154 for Android; 1,500 for iOS), including 208 that contain known malicious code and 140 classified as high risk based on their behavior, all for the Android platform.”
“Nor was the Bible alone in this regard: analysis revealed similar prevalence for malicious and high-risk Quran apps. At almost 4,500 unique Quran apps (3,804 for Android; 646 for iOS),” Proofpoint reports. “Sixteen of the scanned Quran apps contain known malicious code and another thirty-eight were classified as high risk (again, all for the Android platform), and a number of them communicate with as many as thirty-five servers. One of the ten most-downloaded apps is clearly riskware: installing itself as a boot-time app it communicates to thirty-one different servers; reads the user’s SMS messages; can send SMS messages from the user; and can look up the user’s GPS location. As a whole, the scanned Quran apps communicate data to 1,440 servers across thirty-six countries.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Holy malware, fragmandroid!
I suppose that’s why Google doesn’t use the “Don’t be evil” mantra anymore.
The Lord works in mysterious ways.
These findings are a testament to iOS security.
The Bible has already got it covered.
Job 11:18
And you will feel secure, because there is hope; you will look around and take your rest in security.
or …
Psalm 122:7
Peace be within your walls and security within your towers!
God needs a little help tracking the online activities of the flock, apparently.
Its devil code….satan did it! Lord taketh the malicious code away!
The flawis much more obvious than that..
Woe to ye androiders!
God wanted it this way
After refusing help from passing boats 3 times, saying that God will save him, a man drowns. Facing his maker he asks why God didn’t save him only to be told, “I did send 3 boats your way, what more did you want”.
Well, Android sufferers, Apple is at its 6th generation iPhone, what more do you want ?
The devil’s in the details.
I still have friends who say they see no problem with their Android phones and generically say “I have nothing to hide so I don’t worry about malware.”
Well, some use Uber, and that means their credit card info is one their phone. Some people are deaf. Nuff said.
I wonder, how many of those are government sponsored?
OMF. I seriously don’t get it why people and the press in general Just Don’t Get It. As I noted last weekend, I actually heard one pair of hackers attempt to convince people that iOS and Android security was ‘on a par’. Obviously NOT!
And yet: iOS gets into trouble via a Chinese WAREZ version of Xcode, leading to compromised iOS apps and the press looses its mind. Those apps’ malicious features turn out to be innocuous, and the press ignores the news. It’s just the usual Apple hate. Now we have the usual Android LERV <3 <3 💋💋💋 leading to the DETRIMENT of suckers who believe this utter bullshit.
Android: The Single Most Dangerous Mobile OS, by orders of magnitude. Don’t use it. You have been advised. Use iOS. It’s not perfect. It’s merely the best.
[Apologies for the spelling/grammar blunders above. I just woke up. Must have coffee. MUST HAVE COFFEE…]
There is more than one level of irony in this.
And how many of these apps are on the Google play store? >
Probably only 208 out of 208…