The Trojan’s sophistication lies in its ability to bypass CAPTCHA authentication systems by redirecting these requests to an online image-to-text recognition service,. This is the malware’s first occurrence in the official Google Play store, suggesting its developers found new ways of packing it into seemingly legitimate apps that can bypass Google Bouncer – the Google’s vetting system.

One of the most affected countries was Russia.Īt the time, Bitdefender was conducting its own research into the malware’s behavior and found that recent versions had stopped using the highly advanced packer – that eased its detection but still uses obfuscated strings. Identified by Bitdefender as, the malware was first spotted in late 2014, but was only distributed via third-party marketplaces or local popular social networks in Eastern Europe. A sophisticated CAPTCHA-bypassing Android malware has been found harbored in Google Play apps seeking to covertly subscribe thousands of users to premium-rate services.

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