Android Malware Goes Bollywood

We already know that mobile malware is growing at a fantastic rate, but we now see a new trend that concerns us: specific regions targeted by mobile threats. Just last week McAfee Labs blogged about a new malware threat targeting phone owners in South Korea. Today we have identified another new strain of Android Trojan that aims at users in India. A twist in this new strain is that all the apps the Trojan is wrapped into have a Bollywood theme.

McAfee Mobile Research has identified five apps distributed on third-party app markets that contain this fake job-offer Trojan. Reminiscent of a badly written Bollywood musical, with the bad guy interrupting the song-and-dance number, the Trojan runs as a background service when the infected device boots, and shows the message “Important incoming email from HR, do the needful,” followed by redirection to a bogus job-offer letter hosted on an external website as an image.

The scam requires the victims to believe they have been selected as job candidates. In order to secure their placement in the company, they must make a deposit into a bank account. Our investigation shows that there are two versions of this scam, one circulated in January and another circulated in February. Both refer to the same job offer, with slight differences in the dates.

McAfee Mobile Security detects this malware as FakeJobOffer.A. If you have been targeted by this scam, we would like to hear from you.

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