It appears that nowadays no one is safe from cyber attackers. It appears that even indie games like Minecraft are not free from malicious attempts. While this game is supposed to be rather secure, Symantec, the cyber security firm, discovered something that worried all Minecraft players. It appears that certain Minecraft add-ons that can be found in the Google Play store may represent a threat, since there is code for Sockbot, a Trojan malware.
“This highly flexible proxy topology could easily be extended to take advantage of a number of network-based vulnerabilities, and could potentially span security boundaries. In addition to enabling arbitrary network attacks, the large footprint of this infection could also be leveraged to mount a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack,” explained Shaun Aimoto from Symantec.
Infected apps
It was also mentioned that eight Minecraft-based apps have been found and they are all infected with the Trojan. This means that 600,000 to 2.8. million Android devices might be in in danger. According to Symantec, the countries that were targeted were usually the US, Brazil, Germany, Russia and Ukraine.
In order to keep players safe, Symantec has already announced Google. This means that the apps should be removed from the Google Play Store, so that Minecraft mobile won’t be a threat anymore.
This is not the first time security experts find infected apps present in Google Play Store, and a better security system is definitely needed. In this case, once the applications got on someone’s device they managed to stay hidden by tricking detection tools with encryption.
As always, in order to stay safe it is better to download only apps from trusted sources, check the required permissions that come with the apps and keep your software up to date.
