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Found: 280 Android apps that use OCR to steal cryptocurrency credentials (arstechnica.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

10 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/22281366

Optical Character Recognition converts passwords shown in images to machine-readable text.

McAfee blog: https://www.mcafee.com/blogs/other-blogs/mcafee-labs/new-android-spyagent-campaign-steals-crypto-credentials-via-image-recognition/

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago (1 children)

There’s no indication that any of the apps were available through Google Play.

So it's just users installing untrusted apps to their phone?

scour infected phones for text messages, contacts, and all stored images

They also can't do that without the user explicitly giving the app permission to do those things, unless they found an exploit or something, but the article doesn't say that.

Also, why would you have images with passwords in them on your phone anyway?

People really should know better nowadays than to do any of this shit. Every step here is preventable by the user just thinking about what they're really doing.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

A lot of cryptowallets let the user log in with a randomly generated combination of words. They often ask the user to write those down on paper. However, some people just screenshot that. This malware looks for those combinations specifically.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

you mean the seed? i though that should be written on paper, store in a safe, and never on any electronic medium.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Just like how people should use long unique passwords

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Let me express my huge distrust in McAfee.

Thanks for your attention.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

Huge distrust in both the company and the man himself even after leaving the company. But I must say the world got a little more dull and gray when he died.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 months ago

Sooooooo.......no list of what those apps are?

[–] [email protected] 39 points 2 months ago (1 children)

security firm McAfee

Now there's an oxymoron. Let me know when they can write a virus scanner that works.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

So do you think this research is invalid, or are you just being snarky for the sake of it?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Hard to say for sure. They may have legitimately found something, but my experience with McAfee products has been abysmal. The last time I dealt with it, someone had the full paid version of their virus scanner which was up to date but wasn't finding anything. I ran the free version of AVG and found over 200 items (mostly trojans and other malware). Their research may be valid, but I certainly wouldn't trust any of their software to find even widely-known issues.