Are You An Android User And Not Aware of This New Virus ?

By Tolulope Oke

According to Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, a hazardous new virus outbreak has been discovered in fake YouTube and WhatsApp apps.

According to the company’s most recent Quarterly Adversarial Threat Report 2022, fraudulent versions of well-known apps like WhatsApp and YouTube are being infected with the new Dracarys malware.

The report explains that the virus strain can discreetly take images, activate the microphone on the phone or tablet, and collect call logs, contact information, files, SMS texts, geolocation, and system data from an Android device.

The hacker outfit APT’s Dracarys virus is called after the dragon from Game of Thrones’ Battle Cry. It has been reported that this hacker gang targets users in the UK, New Zealand, India, and Pakistan.

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The report reads: “We found Bitter using a new custom Android malware family we named Dracarys. Notably, it used accessibility services, a feature in the Android operating system to assist users with disabilities, to automatically click through and grant the app certain permissions without the user having to do it.

“Bitter injected Dracarys into trojanized (non-official) versions of YouTube, Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, and custom chat applications capable of accessing call logs, contacts, files, text messages, geolocation, device information, taking photos, enabling microphone, and installing apps. While the malware functionality is fairly standard, as of this writing, malware and its supporting infrastructure has not been detected by existing public anti-virus systems. It shows that Bitter has managed to reimplement common malicious functionality in a way that went undetected by the security community for some time.”