People who want to cause trouble are using sneaky tricks with Android apps to do bad things.
A company called Zimperium found that some of these apps are using special ways to hide. They looked at 3,300 things that had these sneaky ways, and 71 of them could be put on phones without any problems.
It seems these apps were never on Google’s official app store, which means they got onto phones in different ways. Usually, they tricked people into putting them on their phones from places that aren’t trustworthy, or they used tricks to make people think the apps were good.
These apps use a kind of secret technique to make sure they’re hard to understand. They use a way of packing the app that most tools can’t open easily. This helps them avoid getting analyzed or checked.
The good thing about this tricky way is that it works on newer Android phones, ones above Android 9 Pie.
The people at a cybersecurity company in Texas started looking into this after someone on the internet talked about an app doing these things.
Normally, Android apps are packed in a certain way, like being put into a bag. But some apps are put into the bag in a way that’s not normal. These special bags don’t work on older phones, but they work just fine on newer ones.
Zimperium also found out that the bad app makers are doing other sneaky things. They’re giving the app files names that are really long, which makes things go wrong when people try to check the app. They’re also messing up some files to make tools crash.
All of this news comes a few weeks after Google said that some people are using tricks to put bad apps on Android phones. They’re doing things to avoid Google’s checks and hurt people who use Android phones.
