Security researchers at Trend Micro have discovered a malicious application in Google Play that was developed using the Kotlin programming language.
Detected as ANDROIDOS_BKOTKLIND.HRX, the malicious program was masquerading as Swift Cleaner, a utility designed to clean and optimize Android devices. The application had between 1,000 and 5,000 installs when discovered.
Kotlin, a first-class language for writing Android apps, was announced in May 2017. Coming from Google, it is open source and is already used by 17% of Android Studio projects. Some of the top applications to use the programming language include Twitter, Pinterest, and Netflix.