Kaspersky Discover Android Application Infiltrated by Bitcoin Miner

Kaspersky Lab's security firm finds a number of Android apps in the Google Play Store app store infiltrated by Bitcoin miners and other cryptocurrency currencies.

The Russian-based company says most Android apps infiltrated by crypto miners are published in sports and offer streaming capabilities.

The presence of this streaming capability has become the work of Bitcoin miners to hide the surge in resource use caused by crypto mining.

Portuguese football streaming app for example, has been downloaded up to 100 thousand times. According Kaspersky, the application there are miners who will work when users start streaming.

In this way, malicious code will be more difficult for the user to detect due to a spike in CPU usage, which also occurs when the user is streaming.

"The app is accessing the placartv.com server, it is the same domain used in the developer's email address and written on Google Play." Unbeknownst to visitors, the placartv.com site runs a script that mines crypto currency, "Kaspersky said in a statement.

The cybersecurity company calls the Bitcoin miners and crypto currencies also infiltrated in a variety of other applications.

For example, a discount aggregator app that instead opens a site with a discount product, the app actually works to load pages with crypto currency mining codes.

Interestingly among the various applications, one of them named Crypto Mining for Children, who claims himself as a crypto currency miner for donations and charities.

"In the description, none of the information that calls where this coin will be donated, although this information is publicly publicized when there is a donation, and moreover, the name of the developer is similar to a well-known mobile app, only one of the letters is omitted.This is a common trick used by the offender phishing, "Kaspersky said.