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A malicious campaign leveraged seemingly innocuous Android dropper apps on the Google Play Store to compromise users' devices with  banking   malware . These 17 dropper apps, collectively dubbed  DawDropper  by Trend Micro, masqueraded as productivity and utility apps such as document scanners, QR code readers, VPN services, and call recorders, among others. All these apps in question have been removed from the app marketplace. "DawDropper uses Firebase Realtime Database, a third-party cloud service, to evade detection and dynamically obtain a payload download address," the researchers  said . "It also hosts malicious payloads on GitHub." Droppers are apps designed to sneak past Google's Play Store security checks, following which they are used to download more potent and intrusive malware on a device, in this case,  Octo  (Coper),  Hydra ,  Ermac , and  TeaBot . Attack chains involved the DawDropper malware establishing connections with a Firebase Re

More than 4,000 Android apps that use Google's cloud-hosted Firebase databases are 'unknowingly' leaking sensitive information on their users, including their email addresses, usernames, passwords, phone numbers, full names, chat messages and location data. The investigation, led by Bob Diachenko from Security Discovery in partnership with Comparitech, is the result of an analysis of 15,735 Android apps, which comprise about 18 percent of all apps on Google Play store. "4.8 percent of mobile apps using Google Firebase to store user data are not properly secured, allowing anyone to access databases containing users' personal information, access tokens, and other data without a password or any other authentication," Comparitech said. Acquired by Google in 2014, Firebase is a popular mobile application development platform that offers a variety of tools to help third-party app developers build apps, securely store app data and files, fix issues, and ev

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Mobile security researchers have discovered unprotected Firebase databases of thousands of iOS and Android mobile applications that are exposing over 100 million data records, including plain text passwords, user IDs, location, and in some cases, financial records such as banking and cryptocurrency transactions. Google's Firebase service is one of the most popular back-end development platforms for mobile and web applications that offers developers a cloud-based database, which stores data in JSON format and synced it in the real-time with all connected clients. Researchers from mobile security firm Appthority discovered that many app developers' fail to properly secure their back-end Firebase endpoints with firewalls and authentication, leaving hundreds of gigabytes of sensitive data of their customers publicly accessible to anyone. Since Firebase offers app developers an API server, as shown below, to access their databases hosted with the service, attackers can gain acce