But there’s more to the threat factor here. Since these are core services for a phone, a lot of users won’t want to engage with them out of fear that it would break the corresponding systems on their phone. For example, 11 out of the 14 spyware apps tried to hide in plain sight under the guise of apps with names like “Wi-Fi,” “Internet Service,” and “SyncServices,” complete with believable system icons to help avoid any suspicion. Liu, lead author of the research paper, told Digital Trends in an interview that most of these apps try to hide or use “innocent” names and iconography to avoid suspicion. Hiding, manipulating, and playing the system Generated using Dall-E 2 / OpenAI But that privilege is not really available to victims of these spyware apps, which can cost anywhere between $30 to $100 with a subscription model. One would think that a quick look at the app launcher would alert the victim about any suspicious apps installed on their phones. Such apps are known to disable the “Force Stop” and “Uninstall” buttons in some cases. UC San DiegoĮleven of the studied apps tried to obscure the process of uninstalling them, while every single one of the spyware apps came coded with a “die-hard” functionality that allowed it to automatically start after a reboot or after memory clearance by the Android system. That’s how some spyware apps hide in plain sight. The Wi-Fi icon at the top of the app library is bogus. But that’s not where the horror tale ends. In terms of their basic capabilities, these apps were able to access calendar entries, call logs, clipboard entries, contacts, information pulled from other applications installed on the victim’s phone, location details, network information, phone details, messages, and media files.Ī majority of these apps were also able to secretly access the camera feed and the microphone for multimedia capture, taking screenshots via a remote command and even accessing protected data. A collaborative research effort led by Alex Liu from the University of California, San Diego, studied 14 stalkerware apps that are readily available from third-party online websites - and found them loaded with some extremely worrying capabilities. Fitbit Versa 3Īs dangerous as it all sounds, the situation is even more grim due to the lack of of defense mechanisms on Android phones, especially for folks that aren’t particularly tech-savvy.
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