Beauty Camera Apps Steal Users Data by Sending Pornographic Content

Beware: Beauty Camera Apps Send Pornographic Content To Users And Steals Their Data – Delete Them Right Away

Beware, there are dangerous apps hiding on Google Play Store even though it's supposed to be a safe space for users. Despite the best efforts of Google, malicious apps have made their way onto the Google Play Store.

These Beauty Camera apps redirect victims to install another malicious app on the Play Store once they are launched.

Further, these malicious apps when downloaded can infect other genuine apps by exploiting the Android security vulnerabilities and send collected private data to the remote servers owned by hackers.

Web Analysts discovered several beauty camera apps (detected as AndroidOS_BadCamera.HRX) which are capable of accessing remote ad configuration servers that can be used for malicious purposes.

These malicious apps are available on the Google Play Store for all Android users, where they have been downloaded and installed by millions of users, which is unsurprising given the popularity of these kinds of apps. 

Researchers also detected adware behavior originating from an infected app and also pushing pornographic content onto the device.

These malicious apps were developed with the sole intention to push several annoying notifications and malicious ads including fraudulent and pornography content that will pop up via the user’s browser.

This Beauty Plus and other dangerous apps intended to cause damage, disrupt, steal, downloading or installing new versions of malicious apps on user’s phone or in general impose some other harmful action on the data or device.

Further, the adware will alter your device browser’s settings and whenever the user clicks on these malicious pop-up ads, a paid online pornography player (detected as AndroidOS_PornPlayer.UHRXA) was downloaded without the user’s authorization.

With each click on pop-up ads, there are high chances that the developers of these apps are earning money via PPC.

These apps also redirect the users to the third party and malicious websites and accumulating user’s data such as geographic locations, email addresses, IMEIs, and sending collected data to those remote servers from which it was downloaded which can further lead to serious privacy violations, financial loss or even theft.

Also Read: Cyber Attack on Patient Data of Verity Health System

These malicious apps promise to make you look more attractive, but actually appear to be a massive con.

These Beauty Plus apps seemingly allow users to ‘beautify’ their pictures and selfies by uploading them to the designated server.

However, instead of getting a final result with the edited picture, the user gets a picture with a fake update prompt in nine different languages.

The hackers and developers of such infected apps can collect the photos uploaded in the app, and likely use them for malicious purposes – for example as fake profile pics in social media platforms.

The infected apps would run in the background thereby exhausting internet access data plans and causing even more financial losses to the victims.

These Beauty Plus apps pose a risk to Android smartphone users and need to be uninstalled.

While most of these have already been removed from Google Play Store, but not before the apps were downloaded and installed by millions of users.

To Conclude

If you’re one of the many unfortunate victims who has downloaded these malicious beauty plus apps from Google Play Store, we suggest you remove the faulty application as soon as possible before it causes more harm to your smartphone.

At the moment this particular incident where the fraudulent apps infected with malicious content made it past Google’s scanner and tried to put the privacy of Android smartphone users at stake which definitely raises questions around privacy policies and also whether Google is doing enough to protect Android users from such practices.

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