Potentially Unwanted Applications

Publications

The State of Stalkerware in 2019

Six months ago, we created a special alert that notifies users about commercial spyware (stalkerware) products installed on their phones. This report examines the use of stalkerware and the number of users affected by this software in the first eight months of 2019.

Publications

Beware of stalkerware

Spyware might sound like a concept from a Hollywood movie, yet commercial versions of such programs – known in the cybersecurity industry as ‘stalkerware’ – are a daily reality for many people. For the price of just a few dollars, consumer spyware programs allow users to spy on their current or former partners, and even strangers

Publications

Game of Threats

To find out exactly how cybercriminals capitalize on the rise in illegal downloads of TV content, we have researched the landscape of malware threats disguised as new episodes of popular TV shows distributed through torrent websites.

Research

Pirate matryoshka

Cybercriminals are always coming up with new kinds of fraud. In this particular case, they employed a method for delivering malicious content through torrent trackers to install adware on user computers.

Malware reports

Mobile malware evolution 2018

Users of mobile devices in 2018 faced what could be the strongest cybercriminal onslaught ever seen. Over the course of the year, we observed both new mobile device infection techniques and a step-up in the use of tried-and-tested distribution schemes (for example, SMS spam).

Research

How do file partner programs work?

It’s easy to notice if you’ve fallen victim to an advertising partner program: the system has new apps that you didn’t install, ad pages spontaneously open in the browser, ads appear on sites where they never used to, and so on. If you notice these symptoms on your computer, 99% of the time it’s “partner stuff”.

Malware descriptions

Pbot: evolving adware

It was more than a year ago that we detected the first member of Pbot family. Since then, we have encountered several modifications of the program, one of which went beyond adware by installing and running a hidden miner on victim computers.

Research

Android commercial spyware

There’s certainly no shortage of commercial spying apps for Android, with most positioned as parental control tools. In reality, however, these apps barely differ from spyware, with the exception perhaps of the installation method.

Research

The Magala Trojan Clicker: A Hidden Advertising Threat

Magala falls into the category of Trojan Clickers that imitate a user click on a particular webpage, thus boosting advertisement click counts. It’s worth pointing out that Magala doesn’t actually affect the user, other than consuming some of the infected computer’s resources. The main victims are those paying for the advertising.

Reports

How to catch a wild triangle

How Kaspersky researchers obtained all stages of the Operation Triangulation campaign targeting iPhones and iPads, including zero-day exploits, validators, TriangleDB implant and additional modules.

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