Security company Kaspersky has come across several Android apps published on the Google Play Store that come bundled with cryptocurrency miners.
The Russian vendor says most of the apps were published in the sports section and offered capabilities like streaming in an attempt to hide the spike in resource usage caused by crypto mining.
A Portuguese soccer streaming app, for instance, was downloaded more than 100,000 times, Kaspersky says, and it bundled a miner that kicked in once users started streaming. This way, the malicious code was harder to detect by users because a spike in CPU usage is expected when streaming.
“The apps access the placartv.com server. This same domain is used in the developer’s email address specified in the Google Play store. Unbeknown to visitors, the site placartv.com runs a script that mines cryptocurrency,” Kaspersky notes.
