How Spies Snuck Malware Into the Google Play Store—Again and Again

Google's Play Store for Android apps has never had a reputation for the strictest protections from malware. Shady adware and even banking trojans have managed over the years to repeatedly defy Google's security checks. Now security researchers have found what appears to be a more rare form of Android abuse: state-sponsored spies who repeatedly slipped their targeted hacking tools into the Play Store and onto victims' phones.

At a remote virtual version of its annual Security Analyst Summit, researchers from the Russian security firm Kaspersky today plan to present research about a hacking campaign they call PhantomLance, in which spies hid malware in the Play Store to target users in Vietnam, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and India. Unlike most of the shady apps found in Play Store malware, Kaspersky's researchers say, PhantomLance's hackers apparently smuggled in data-stealing apps with the aim of infecting only some hundreds of users; the spy campaign likely sent links to the malicious apps to those targets via phishing emails. "In this case, the attackers used Google Play as a trusted source," says Kaspersky researcher Alexey Firsh. "You can deliver a link to this app, and the victim will trust it because it’s Google Play."

Kaspersky says it has tied the PhantomLance campaign to the hacker group OceanLotus, also known as APT32, widely believed to be working on behalf of the Vietnamese government. That suggests the PhantomLance campaign likely mixed spying on Vietnam's Southeast Asian neighbors with domestic surveillance of Vietnamese citizens. Security firm FireEye, for instance, has linked OceanLotus to previous operations that targeted Vietnamese dissidents and bloggers. FireEye also recently spotted the group targeting China's Ministry of Emergency Management as well as the government of the Chinese province of Wuhan, apparently searching for information related to Covid-19.