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Register a new userBeyond the Virus: A First Look at Coronavirus-themed Mobile Malware
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Added by
Ren He
Publication date
2020
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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As the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in early 2020, a number of malicious actors have started capitalizing the topic. Although a few media reports mentioned the existence of coronavirus-themed mobile malware, the research community lacks the understanding of the landscape of the coronavirus-themed mobile malware. In this paper, we present the first systematic study of coronavirus-themed Android malware. We first make efforts to create a daily growing COVID-19 themed mobile app dataset, which contains 4,322 COVID-19 themed apk samples (2,500 unique apps) and 611 potential malware samples (370 unique malicious apps) by the time of mid-November, 2020. We then present an analysis of them from multiple perspectives including trends and statistics, installation methods, malicious behaviors and malicious actors behind them. We observe that the COVID-19 themed apps as well as malicious ones began to flourish almost as soon as the pandemic broke out worldwide. Most malicious apps are camouflaged as benign apps using the same app identifiers (e.g., app name, package name and app icon). Their main purposes are either stealing users private information or making profit by using tricks like phishing and extortion. Furthermore, only a quarter of the COVID-19 malware creators are habitual developers who have been active for a long time, while 75% of them are newcomers in this pandemic. The malicious developers are mainly located in US, mostly targeting countries including English-speaking countries, China, Arabic countries and Europe. To facilitate future research, we have publicly released all the well-labelled COVID-19 themed apps (and malware) to the research community. Till now, over 30 research institutes around the world have requested our dataset for COVID-19 themed research.
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As COVID-19 has been spreading across the world since early 2020, a growing number of malicious campaigns are capitalizing the topic of COVID-19. COVID-19 themed cryptocurrency scams are increasingly popular during the pandemic. However, these newly emerging scams are poorly understood by our community. In this paper, we present the first measurement study of COVID-19 themed cryptocurrency scams. We first create a comprehensive taxonomy of COVID-19 scams by manually analyzing the existing scams reported by users from online resources. Then, we propose a hybrid approach to perform the investigation by: 1) collecting reported scams in the wild; and 2) detecting undisclosed ones based on information collected from suspicious entities (e.g., domains, tweets, etc). We have collected 195 confirmed COVID-19 cryptocurrency scams in total, including 91 token scams, 19 giveaway scams, 9 blackmail scams, 14 crypto malware scams, 9 Ponzi scheme scams, and 53 donation scams. We then identified over 200 blockchain addresses associated with these scams, which lead to at least 330K US dollars in losses from 6,329 victims. For each type of scams, we further investigated the tricks and social engineering techniques they used. To facilitate future research, we have released all the well-labelled scams to the research community.
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