22 Mar, 2025

New North Korean Android spyware slips onto Google Play

A new Android spyware named ‘KoSpy’ is linked to North Korean threat actors who have infiltrated Google Play and third-party app store APKPure through at least five malicious apps. According to Lookout researchers, the spyware is attributed to the North Korean threat group APT37 (aka ‘ScarCruft’). The campaign has been active since March 2022, with the […]

3 mins read

Google expands Android AI scam detection to more Pixel devices

Google has announced an increased rollout of new AI-powered scam detection features on Android to help protect users from increasingly sophisticated phone and text social engineering scams. The tech giant says these features come in response to AI-assisted scam campaigns that, according to statistics from the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, have defrauded people of over $1 […]

4 mins read

Serbian police used Cellebrite zero-day hack to unlock Android phones

Serbian authorities have reportedly used an Android zero-day exploit chain developed by Cellebrite to unlock the device of a student activist in the country and attempt to install spyware. Cellebrite is an Israeli digital forensics company that develops tools used by law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and private companies to extract data from smartphones and other digital […]

4 mins read

OpenAI’s GPT 4.5 spotted in Android beta, launch imminent

OpenAI’s newest model, GPT-4.5, is coming sooner than we expected. A new reference has been spotted on ChatGPT’s Android app that points to a model called “GPT-4.5 research preview.” At the moment, OpenAI offers several models, including GPT-4o, GPT-4o with scheduled tasks, o1, o3-mini, and o3-mini-high. This can be confusing due to the variety of […]

2 mins read

SpyLend Android malware downloaded 100,000 times from Google Play

An Android malware app called SpyLend has been downloaded over 100,000 times from Google Play, where it masqueraded as a financial tool but became a predatory loan app for those in India. The app falls under a group of malicious Android applications called “SpyLoan,” which pretend to be legitimate financial tools or loan services but […]

3 mins read

Crypto-stealing apps found in Apple App Store for the first time

Android and iOS apps on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store contain a malicious software development kit (SDK) designed to steal cryptocurrency wallet recovery phrases using optical character recognition (OCR) stealers. The campaign is called “SparkCat” after the name (“Spark”) of one of the malicious SDK components in the infected apps, with developers likely […]

3 mins read

Google fixes Android kernel zero-day exploited in attacks

The January 2025 Android security updates patch 48 vulnerabilities, including a zero-day kernel vulnerability tagged as exploited in the wild. This high-severity zero-day (tracked as CVE-2024-53104) is a privilege escalation security flaw in the Android Kernel’s USB Video Class driver that allows authenticated local threat actors to elevate privileges in low-complexity attacks. The issue occurs because the driver […]

2 mins read

Google blocked 2.36 million risky Android apps from Play Store in 2024

Google blocked 2.3 million Android app submissions to the Play Store in 2024 due to violations of its policies that made them potentially risky for users. In addition, 158,000 developer accounts were banned for attempting to publish harmful apps like malware and spyware on Android’s official app store. In comparison, Google blocked 2,280,000 risky apps in 2023 and 1,500,000 […]

2 mins read

Windows 11’s Start menu is getting iPhone and Android integration

Windows 11’s Start menu is getting a big update with full-fledged Android and iPhone integration, allowing users improved access to users’ mobile texts and images from their computers. Previously, the feature was limited to Android phones, but now it works with iPhones too. According to Microsoft’s blog post, you’ll need Windows 11 Build 4805 or higher […]

1 min read

New Android Identity Check locks settings outside trusted locations

Google has announced a new Android “Identity Check” security feature that lock sensitive settings behind biometric authentication when outside a trusted location. The new feature is part of Anroid’s theft protection suite, which includes features like last year’s Theft Detection Lock, which is now rolling out to more Android device models. The new Identity Check feature is […]

2 mins read