Posted by Martijn Grooten on Aug 31, 2016
Most research into and protection against malicious apps focuses on single apps. This makes it interesting for malware authors to use app 'collusion': the ability of two (or more) apps to perform an attack in collaboration.
Such attacks have previously been demonstrated as proof-of-concepts but had not yet been found in the wild until earlier this year, when researchers from Intel and a number of UK universities found such behaviour in apps using the MoPlus SDK for Android. Last year, Trend Micro researchers found that this SDK contained a backdoor, but the collusion behaviour had not previously been discovered.
The discovery was mentioned in the McAfee Labs Threat Report for June 2016 (pdf), but full technical details will be shared with the public in the paper Wild Android Collusions, which will be presented at VB2016 in Denver on 5 October.
Why not register for VB2016 to see this and dozens of other presentations from world-class security researchers? Or, if you have research to present yourself, why not submit an abstract to our call for last-minute papers, which closes this Sunday, 4th September?
