HansITAcademy

Pinduoduo, the amazon of China, have recently been found with malware on their off-play version of their app and had their on-play version suspended from google play store.  The app boasts a huge userbase that accounts for three quarters of China’s online population and serves more than 700 million people monthly. The app is is more commonly downloaded via domestic platforms since Google’s isn’t available in china.

The malware takes advantage of CVE-2023-20963, a worksource empty list case vulnerability.  This flaw leads to local escalation of privilege with no additional execution privileges required, making it a high severity threat. The malware can run in the background and capture what users are doing beyond what regular apps are allowed to do and prevent itself from being uninstalled. The malware took advantage of this flaw to boost user statistics and spy on user’s shopping behaviors as well as its competitors.  This malware specifically targeted android based OS, so iphone seems to be safe for now. 

This wasn’t pinduoduo’s first rodeo either. Their earlier versions have installed backdoors and gained unauthorized access to user data and notifications. To prevent this, it’s best to be aware of what you are installing and have anti-malware to prevent malware from installing. Many people think Google’s play protect is safe enough, but truthfully, it isn’t. Google’s play protect is basically built-in malware protection for Android, it’s like microsoft defender for windows. Google play protect scans apps to ensure one doesn’t install harmful apps. However, google play protect has been proven to be not that safe per AV-TEST report. AV-TEST is an independent organization which evaluates and rates antivirus and security suite software. As you can see, it falls at the bottom of the list. I personally recommend going with either Bitfender or norton. If you want to get more details and read about the best antivirus for androids, go here.