Adware is malware used to display money-making banner ads on smartphone screens. On Android the latest threat
Adware has evolved into an even more serious threat. They are becoming very sophisticated Trojans that "voraciously" collect personal data from the mobile device, including name, date of birth, location, serial number, contacts and browser information without the users' consent.
Even though Google - for years - has been stepping up its efforts to remove potentially malicious apps from the Play Store through increasingly stringent controls, Adware often eventually finds a way to sneak onto the shelves. This time they were caught red-handed. Google engineers have, in fact, discovered Chamois lured by suspicious ad traffic during a routine control operation. Despite the obfuscation and anti-analysis techniques used by the adware to go "undetected", Mountain View engineers eventually discovered a large network of developers who had tricked users into installing malicious applications on their cell phones.
Google vs Adware: 1 to 0
"We analyzed malicious applications based on Chamois, and found that they used several techniques to evade our detection and prevention systems," Google engineers explain on the company's official blog. Mountain View, after due analysis, discovered that Chamois applications had a multi-stage payload structure - the malicious code - including a custom encrypted "storage" area for file configuration and additional code that required deeper analysis to detect the malicious part. Google, thanks to this discovery, was able to improve its app testing system that can now detect this threat in the future.