A fake ad blocker infects your Android smartphone and threatens to crash it. Even worse, it hides in memory and is hard to find
A new infected app has been found by Malwarebytes but, for once, it's not an app published on Google's Play Store. Instead, it can be found on alternative stores, it is called Ads Blocker and, paradoxically, it is an adware.
The imagination and prolificacy of cyber criminals, therefore, this time also comes with a fair amount of nerve. By the way, the virus carried by Ads Blocker, named Android/Trojan.FakeAdsBlock, has proven to be particularly difficult to remove without using a good commercial antivirus suite. As if that were not enough, it is also very invasive and, in the worst cases, is capable of rendering infected smartphones almost unusable. The raison d'être of this adware is always the same: to force the infected device to display tons of banner ads in order to cheat online advertising networks. The developer of the app makes money, but the smartphone is knocked out.
How Ads Blocker Infected App Works
Ads Blocker pretends to be an app that is meant to block advertisements on websites, but in reality it is only meant to infect us with Android/Trojan.FakeAdsBlock virus. Once installed, by the way, it does not appear in the app list or on the device's home screen. But as soon as we open the default browser it starts displaying advertisements. And it does it both in the browser and among notifications and even in a widget on the home. In some cases Android/Trojan.FakeAdsBlock also displays a message asking to connect to a VPN to monitor our traffic. If we accept, then the app starts downloading more malware.
How to remove Android/Trojan.FakeAdsBlock
Android/Trojan.FakeAdsBlock virus is very difficult to remove from devices. The app that carries it, as we have seen, hides very well. To find it we have to go to Settings > Applications and view the list of installed apps. We'll find one with no icon and no name, with only space occupied. It is the one that carried Android/Trojan.FakeAdsBlock. Even uninstalling it, however, the malware remains. The only way to take out Android/Trojan.FakeAdsBlock is to use a good Android antivirus. Malwarbytes claims to be able to recognize and remove this annoying, and dangerous, virus and recommends extreme caution when downloading apps from untrusted sources.