Android malware alert! Remove these 17 apps infected with Joker from your smartphone

New Delhi: Joker malware seems to be a really admant one, that juse refuses to leave Google apps. Fresh in the list of the malwares are 17 new ones that are a threat to the android apps.

Security firm Zscaler ThreatLabZ said that it has discovered infected apps on the Google Play store, although they have been removed now.

"Our Zscaler ThreatLabZ research team has been constantly monitoring the Joker malware. Recently, we have seen regular uploads of it onto the Google Play store. Once notified by us, the Google Android Security team took prompt action to remove the suspicious apps (listed below) from the Google Play store." 

"This prompted us to evaluate how Joker is so successful at getting around the Google Play vetting process. We identified 17 different samples regularly uploaded to Google Play in September 2020. There were a total of around 120,000 downloads for the identified malicious apps," Zscaler wrote in a blog.

The following are the names of the infected apps we discovered on the Google Play store:

All Good PDF Scanner
Mint Leaf Message-Your Private Message
Unique Keyboard - Fancy Fonts & Free Emoticons
Tangram App Lock
Direct Messenger
Private SMS
One Sentence Translator - Multifunctional Translator
Style Photo Collage
Meticulous Scanner
Desire Translate
Talent Photo Editor - Blur focus
Care Message
Part Message
Paper Doc Scanner
Blue Scanner
Hummingbird PDF Converter - Photo to PDF
All Good PDF Scanner

It is advisable that you uninstall these apps if you have them on your phone.

Google had identified Bread (also known as Joker), a large-scale billing fraud family in early 2017, identifying apps designed solely for SMS fraud.

In a blogpost in January this year, Google wrote, “As the Play Store has introduced new policies and Google Play Protect has scaled defenses, Bread apps were forced to continually iterate to search for gaps. They have at some point used just about every cloaking and obfuscation technique under the sun in an attempt to go undetected. Many of these samples appear to be designed specifically to attempt to slip into the Play Store undetected and are not seen elsewhere.”