Android | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Between November 2025 and March 2026, the Dutch security firm Eye Security pushed more than 2 million updates to computers it did not own to switch off a background updater that it said could have allowed an outsider to take over the machine. The updater belongs to Time4Popcorn , an abandoned copy of Popcorn Time, a free app that streamed pirated films and TV over BitTorrent. Popcorn Time was popular about a decade ago, and the original shut down in 2014, but several copies kept running under the same name. A separate, legal project that took the Popcorn Time name in early 2025 is unrelated to it. Eye Security, which monitors client networks for threats, found the updater during a routine threat hunt: a program called Updater.exe on one client's laptop kept trying to reach a web address that was no longer registered. The firm registered the address itself to see what would connect, and about 50 requests a second poured in. It later laid out the operation, which it named ...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new Android banking trojan called Hirudo that works by replacing legitimate banking apps with purpose-built patched versions designed to bypass security checks from inside the app itself, marking a new escalation in financial fraud.  Dutch mobile security company ThreatFabric said it identified replacements for eight Indonesian banking apps, while credential targeting in the malware spans Indonesia, China, India, Mexico, Morocco and Thailand. "The operation combines credential theft, device takeover, screen and camera capture, and SMS theft, in combination with a fairly mature backend," Eward Driehuis, vice president of fraud engineering at ThreatFabric, said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. Hirudo facilitates on-device credential theft and live remote control. The malware is delivered by shopping, adult video, and entertainment dropper apps that carry the trojan as a separate installation package, whic...

Google has announced a new security measure that limits access to Android's accessibility services to verified applications classified as Accessibility Tools when Advanced Protection is enabled. With malicious Android applications abusing the API serving as the main conduit for malware and financial fraud, the tech giant said the move would block a major attack pathway. Advanced Protection is a security setting that turns on all Android's security features to secure the device against potential threats. "In Android 17, enabling Advanced Protection automatically restricts AccessibilityService access exclusively to verified applications categorized as Accessibility Tools, closing off a major avenue of attack while preserving vital assistive technology," Google said Thursday. The Android AccessibilityService API is a powerful framework that allows an application to run in the background, intercept user interface events, and interact with other applications on...

RatHat's operators build and publish the Android banking trojan and control infected phones from a web console, according to security company Cleafy. Cleafy has  traced nearly 100 deployments  of that console since April 2026. It said this fits a malware-as-a-service model, in which each customer runs a separate copy. The console stores what the malware collects from each phone, including text messages and passwords entered into fake login screens overlaid on banking apps. Its latest version asks Google's Gemini AI model to estimate each victim's bank balance from those messages and sorts the phones into high-value and mid-value groups. Nothing in the samples Cleafy analyzed uses the model to move money. Its role is "deciding which victims are worth an operator's time," the company said. One Console, Three Versions The malware on victims' phones has changed little since late 2025, Cleafy said. The console behind it has been replaced. Samples f...

A OnePlus 15 running the latest OxygenOS can be rooted by a malicious app the owner installs, one that asks for no special permissions. A researcher, Rasmus Moorats,  chained two flaws in OnePlus's own software  to gain root access, the highest level of control over an Android phone. OnePlus told him the same flaws affect many more of its own devices and those of OPPO, though it has not said which. OnePlus confirmed both flaws in May. In the same reply, the company told Moorats that it alone decides when to make a flaw public and warned that publishing without its permission could result in legal liability. He published on September 24 anyway, when OnePlus had released no fix. OnePlus set out its position in the reply,  which Moorats published in full . It said a fix was scheduled, but claimed "the exclusive final right of vulnerability disclosure," and told him that even after a fix ships, researchers may not publish full technical details on their own. The comp...