The coronavirus pandemic is dictating new rules for life. But if sitting at home and buying food in deliveries in principle makes sense, then the attempts of some especially advanced users to treat or diagnose coronavirus with the help of applications are not only pointless, but even dangerous. Meanwhile, cybercriminals are actively taking advantage of this situation and, one by one, release applications that promise to help determine your symptoms of the disease, but in fact infect your smartphone, get full control over it, and even steal your money.
The spread of coronavirus can be monitored in real time, but no one puts GPS beacons to the infected
Despite the fact that the spread of fake apps with diagnostic or similar functions occurs outside of Google Play, their danger should not be underestimated. Practice has shown that a lot of users Android are looking on the Internet for various ways to identify signs of this disease in themselves, and applications that offer this opportunity are quite in demand, even if they can be downloaded only as an APK file and only from a site that is not secured over HTTPS.
How scammers profit from the coronavirus
There are no coronavirus diagnostic applications in the world. Humble yourself
One such application is called the Covid-19 Tracker. It is hosted on a website located at coronavirusapp.site, which contains a lot of inaccurate information about the program's capabilities – from fake certificates of the World Health Organization and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, to the mention of six million people who downloaded the application and an average rating of 4. 4 points out of 5. However, it is not specified where such a score was given.
The attackers do not promise to diagnose the coronavirus to users who download it, because it would be too naive, but at the same time they guarantee that the application will be able to locate the nearest infected, wherever you are. It is assumed that in this way, users would be able to determine how far from them the vectors of infection are located, and could simply not approach them in order to protect themselves from infection. That's just where this data from the application came from, the attackers did not even come up with.
How to monitor the spread of coronavirus online
Covid-19 Tracker is not tracking coronavirus, but you
Needless to say, the Covid-19 Tracker application cannot do anything of the described. In fact, it carries in its composition a Trojan called CovidLock, which gains access to system functions, asks the user to confirm the activation of its mechanisms by entering the password from the smartphone, and then simply changes the password and locks the device. As a result, a notification appears on the screen that the device is locked, and it can be unlocked only after the cybercriminals have transferred a ransom of $ 100 to the provided bitcoin wallet.
Many of you probably find it difficult to imagine who are the people who naively download apps like this and try to track coronavirus patients on a map. In fact, these are the same people, like you, who probably found out that there is a similar application in China. And if they have it, why can't we have it? But along with naivety, these people also suffer from inattention when they install an application from an unknown source, and then also provide it with all system privileges.
Just in case, I will clarify again: do not try to search the Internet for applications that diagnose coronavirus or are looking for those who have already been infected with it. Despite the fact that scientists from all over the world already have approximate data on the number of infected, no one installs special GPS beacons for them just so that someone can follow them, not to mention the fact that to determine the infection it is necessary to take biomedical for analysis, but it is impossible to diagnose anything by external signs. Well, and in fairness, I will say that telemedicine applications like Yandex.Zdorovia and others like it will not work for these purposes either. Not only will they not help you, but either they will mislead you even more, or they will say obvious things that you already knew. Checked on myself.