Samsung Galaxy store has applications that could infect its phones with malware.
Samsung has its own app store for the Galaxy smartphones in addition to the play store. Microsoft had also opted to go with Amazon rather than run its own store. This happened when Windows 11 picked up support for the Android apps.
Samsung’s Galaxy Store Has Apps That Could Infect Phones With Malware
There are numerous Showbox movie piracy app clones on the Samsung Galaxy store. These apps that Samsung is distributing to customers may have the capability to infect customers’ devices with malware as per AndroidPolice.
I gave Huawei shit for this, gonna do it to Samsung too.
Samsung is hosting literal malware on the Galaxy Store. Google’s anti-virus protection software, built into Play Services, stops the install.
I’ve found at least 5 of these apps in a row on the Galaxy Store. pic.twitter.com/LiiDJtGwmb— Max Weinbach (@MaxWinebach) December 27, 2021
Further, in addition to this, an analysis was done of one of the Showbox apps at Virustotal that gave a list of more than a dozen of low-grade alerts. These alerts were from security vendors and included riskware, adware, etc.
Apart from this, if you see you will find that some apps also request more permissions than normally required. These unnecessary permissions include access to contacts, call logs and the telephone.
An investigation done by a mobile security analyst Linuxct showed that ad tech can do dynamic code execution which means that even though the app itself may not directly have malware; However, it can definitely download and execute other code, that may include malware. The analyst further pointed out that it could be weaponized easily. Also, there are quite a few legitimate use cases for this functionality.
It is important to note that Samsung has apps that are just clones of a well-known app called Showbox. Showbox comes with a history of allowing piracy and giving access to copyrighted content.
There have been no comments as yet from the South Korean company.
However, Samsung is also one of the leaders in technology with work going on its tri-fold smartphone.
