Android users have been urged to delete ‘malicious’ apps from their phones that have been secretly signing them up for paid subscriptions.
Security firm Kaspersky found 11 apps on the Google Play Store with snazzy designs and logos that are actually a devious new type of malware, called Fleckpe.
The apps, which are mostly related to photo and video editing, have names including Photo Effect Editor and Beauty Slimming Photo Editor.
While they’ve now been removed from Google Play, they have already been installed on more than 620,000 devices worldwide and been used to take users’ money without permission.
Although Apple devices are unaffected because they use a different app store, the tech giant recently had to issue a security update of its own.
The apps, which are mostly related to photo and video editing, have names including Photo Effect Editor and Beauty Slimming Photo Editor
According to Kaspersky, this particular new type of malware is being distributed as a Trojan – a type of seemingly innocuous software that later reveals its malicious intent.
It has provided a list of the 11 apps’ package names – the code that uniquely identifies each one on devices and the Google Play store.
Anyone with the 11 apps installed on their phone or tablet should delete them without delay, because they sign users up to a paid subscription option without their knowledge.
‘Every once in a while, someone will come across malicious apps on Google Play that seem harmless at first,’ said Dmitry Kalinin, developer at Kaspersky, in a report.
‘Some of the trickiest of these are subscription Trojans, which often go unnoticed
