Openness – the very characteristic of Android that makes us love it – is a double-edged sword. Redditor lompolo has stumbled upon a perfect example of that fact; he’s noticed that a publisher has taken "… 21 popular free apps from the market, injected root exploits into them and republished." The really scary part? "50k-200k downloads combined in 4 days."
Lompolo explains the situation quite well:Link to publishers apps here. I just randomly stumbled into one of the apps, recognized it and noticed that the publisher wasn’t who it was supposed to be.
Super Guitar Solo for example is originally Guitar Solo Lite. I downloaded two of the apps and extracted the APK’s, they both contain what seems to be the "rageagainstthecage" root exploit – binary contains string "CVE-2010-EASY Android local root exploit (C) 2010 by 743C". Don’t know what the apps actually do, but can’t be good.
I appreciate being able to publish an update to an app and the update going live instantly, but this is a bit scary. Some sort of moderation, or at least quicker reaction to malware complaints would be nice.EDIT: After some dexing and jaxing, the apps seem to be at least posting the IMEI and IMSI codes to http://184.105.245.17:8080/GMServer/GMServlet, which seems to be located in
Fremont, CA.I asked our resident hacker to take a look at the code himself, and he’s verified it does indeed root the user’s device via rageagainstthecage or exploid. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg: it does more than just yank IMEI and IMSI. There’s another APK hidden inside the code, and it steals nearly everything it can: product ID, model, partner (provider?), language, country, and userID. But that’s all child’s play; the true pièce de résistance is that it has the ability to download more code. In other words, there’s no way to know what the app does after it’s installed, and the possibilities are nearly endless. Justin pinged a contact at Google to bring the issue to their attention. In the time I’ve proofed this post, they’ve already checked the apps and are planning on pulling them from the Market [Update: holy cheeseballs, they've been pulled already! Took less than 5 minutes from first contact to pull!], as well as remotely removing them from user’s devices. Unfortunately, that doesn’t remove any code that’s already been backdoored in. Read more: 
Android Police
Lompolo explains the situation quite well:Link to publishers apps here. I just randomly stumbled into one of the apps, recognized it and noticed that the publisher wasn’t who it was supposed to be.
Super Guitar Solo for example is originally Guitar Solo Lite. I downloaded two of the apps and extracted the APK’s, they both contain what seems to be the "rageagainstthecage" root exploit – binary contains string "CVE-2010-EASY Android local root exploit (C) 2010 by 743C". Don’t know what the apps actually do, but can’t be good.
I appreciate being able to publish an update to an app and the update going live instantly, but this is a bit scary. Some sort of moderation, or at least quicker reaction to malware complaints would be nice.EDIT: After some dexing and jaxing, the apps seem to be at least posting the IMEI and IMSI codes to http://184.105.245.17:8080/GMServer/GMServlet, which seems to be located in
Fremont, CA.I asked our resident hacker to take a look at the code himself, and he’s verified it does indeed root the user’s device via rageagainstthecage or exploid. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg: it does more than just yank IMEI and IMSI. There’s another APK hidden inside the code, and it steals nearly everything it can: product ID, model, partner (provider?), language, country, and userID. But that’s all child’s play; the true pièce de résistance is that it has the ability to download more code. In other words, there’s no way to know what the app does after it’s installed, and the possibilities are nearly endless. Justin pinged a contact at Google to bring the issue to their attention. In the time I’ve proofed this post, they’ve already checked the apps and are planning on pulling them from the Market [Update: holy cheeseballs, they've been pulled already! Took less than 5 minutes from first contact to pull!], as well as remotely removing them from user’s devices. Unfortunately, that doesn’t remove any code that’s already been backdoored in. Read more:
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