Recently group of hackers hacked into various celebrities’ iCloud accounts and stole their personal photos now planning a fake, malicious “Flappy Bird” clone game that will run on the Android mobile operating system. This application takes advantage of the user permissions granted while installing it on the user’s phone. According to The Guardian’s article, the group,which was noticed exchanging the photos on hacker group AnonIB, may have been using the clone app for over 2 and a half years now. One of the hackers made a post claiming he had developed a clone version of the popular game which downloads photos from the phone and sends them to his server, as seen in the image below –
It can be observed that the poster didn’t want to risk letting his license being revoked and so was offering a monetary reward to anyone who would get people to install the app and let it download their personal photos to his server. Rik Ferguson, vice president of security research at Trend Micro, noted that “ “We frequently see manifestations of malware on Google Play Store and it’s certainly not malware-free.” Indeed, there have been dozens of clones of the very popular game for Android,especially since it was taken down by the original developer, Dong Nguyen. It is not completely clear as to whether the post is original and the plan was carried out, but the fact remains that our intimate photos/videos may not be as private as we think they are.
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