More Than 100 Google Play Store Apps Infected with Malicious IFrames

iFrames used to to embed another document within the current HTML document.Malicious iFrames has been discovered in more than 100 google play store android applications .

Researcher’s from paloaltonetworks said, “132 Android apps on Google Play infected with tiny hidden IFrames that link to malicious domains in their local HTML pages“

The most popular one having more than 10,000 installs alone .most likely that the app developers’ development platforms were infected with malware that searches for HTML pages and injects malicious content at the end of the HTML pages it finds ,Researcher’s said.

Most important things we should Focus here is ,

One of the infected pages also attempts to download and install a malicious Microsoft Windows executable file at the time of page loading, but as the device is not running Windows, it will not execute.

According to the classification, Non-Android Threat refers to apps that are unable to cause harm to the user or Android device, but contains components that are potentially harmful to other platforms.

Infection Working Function

Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 researchers Xiao Zhang, Wenjun Hu, and Shawn Jin elaborate on this point in a blog post ,

All infected apps currently only require the INTERNET permission and are equipped with two activities, one is to load interstitial advertisements and the other one is to load the main app.

The latter one instantiates an Android WebView component and displays a local HTML page. The WebView component has JavaScriptInterface enabled. This functionality isn’t used by the samples we’ve examined, but this enables loaded JavaScript code to access the app’s native functionality.

Origin of the Infection

Many of the infected app’s belongs to Indonesia and geographical connections among 7 different developers which all contains straightforward clue comes from the app name .

Currently , infected apps will not cause damage to Android users .This does represent a novel way for platforms to be a “carrier” for malware paloaltonetworks said .