News of the Cyber World

[kyonides]

25 bogus Google Play store apps
promised to mine cryptocurrency for a fee
scamming wannabe investors

Security researchers at Lookout identified more than 170 apps that advertise themselves as providing cryptocurrency-mining services on the cloud for a fee. Unlike other popular cryptocurrency scams on mobile, the criminals aren’t seeking to empty a user’s wallet or download malicious software. Instead, the apps simply charge users for a service that doesn’t exist.

Similar scams have existed in desktop form for a while, but this is the first time researchers have noticed apps designed to conduct such a fraud.
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Lookout estimates that the apps have scammed more than 93,000 victims out of more than $350,000.  The apps fell into two different families of code and Hebeisen says he suspects more scammers will catch on to their playbook.

Only 25 of the mining scam apps identified by researchers were available for download on Google Play. The vast majority had to be sideloaded from a non-trusted source.
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Google has removed the 25 apps flagged by Lookout. Lookout is a participant in Google’s App Defense Alliance, a consortium of mobile security research partners that work with Google Play.

New York City Opens Cyberattack Defense Center

New York City has become the first major American metropolitan area to open a real-time operational center to protect against cybersecurity threats, regional officials said.
Set in a lower Manhattan skyscraper, the center is staffed by a coalition of government agencies and private businesses, with 282 partners overall sharing intelligence on potential cyber threats. Its members range from the New York Police Department to Amazon.com Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. to the Federal Reserve Bank and several New York healthcare systems.
Until last week, the two-year effort known as New York City Cyber Critical Services and Infrastructure was completely virtual.
New York’s cyberdefense center opens as attacks against government and business infrastructure increase across the country. In recent months, cyberattacks have struck U.S. pipelines, meat producers and software companies.
New York has long been seen as particularly vulnerable because of its status as a business center and symbol of American financial and cultural power.