Currently, many people use their cell phones daily in Europe for fairly important tasks, such as carrying out banking transactions, responding to professional emails or even controlling the lights and cameras in the house using home automation. This makes them devices likely to attract the interest of cybercriminals.
Just as there is a type of malware dedicated to displaying ads, not all are as benevolent and there are other types of viruses capable of doing much worse things to the user. Chameleon is one of them and seeks obtain the bank details of the users concerned.
It does this using accessibility services and, now, it has been discovered that a new evolution of it can change the unlock method so that it is a PIN code that can be stolen at the same time. user to control their mobile phone remotely. This way you can do and undo as you wish.
Very dangerous malware
Chameleon is a type of virus that enters Android devices camouflaged as a normal application, making it difficult to detect. Of course, this only happens when apps are downloaded from untrusted sources, since Google Play performs a scan of all apps installed on the device to verify that they are trustworthy.
This new version will scan the Android version of the device, and if it is Android 13 or higher, as shown HackerNews, will force the user to enable accessibility services by tricking them, since he believes it to be a reliable application. Once done, the unlocking mechanism will be silently changed to a PIN code that you can hijack.
Using this code, cybercriminals can unlock and control the mobile phone remotely, so they can access both banking applications and online storeswith the great risk that this poses for the wallet of the person affected by this malware.
The best way to prevent this from ending up on your mobile or tablet is to not download applications that could be compromised from untrustworthy sources or that promise to offer a normally paid service completely free.
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