An Android horror game with over 50,000 installs was found to exhibit malicious behavior, stealing the gamers' Google and Facebook credentials, and siphoning their data after logging into their accounts. The game is called Scary Granny ZOMBYE Mod: The Horror Game 2019 (Scary Granny) and it is designed to bank on the success of another Android game dubbed Granny that currently has over 100 million installs. While Scary Granny is a fully functional game which would actually keep gamers playing it to avoid any suspicion and raising any red flags, it was removed on June 27 from Google's Play Store after the researchers who unearthed its phishing and data siphoning abilities reported it to Google. To hide its actual "horror" side, the game would delay exhibiting any malicious activity for up to two days after being installed as Wandera's research team discovered. The app would also only turn on its data-stealing modules only if it was being used on older Android versions, with users of newer devices running up to date operating systems not being impacted. When being installed, the Scary Granny game gains persistence on the devices by asking for permissions to launch itself after the smartphone or tablet is restarted. This allows it to show full-screen phishing overlays even after the Android users reboot their devices, by first displaying "a notification telling the user to update Google security services. When the user hits ‘update’, a fake Google login page is presented, which is very convincing other than the fact ‘sign in’ is spelled incorrectly." Learn more by visiting OUR FORUM.

The update mechanism as it is currently implemented in Microsoft Teams desktop app allows downloading and executing arbitrary files on the system. The same issue affects GitHub, WhatsApp, and UiPath software for desktop computers but it can be used only to download a payload. These applications rely on the open source Squirrel project to manage installation and updating routines, which uses NuGet package manager to create the necessary files. Multiple security researchers discovered that using the 'update' command for a vulnerable application it is possible to execute an arbitrary binary in the context of the current user. The same goes for 'squirrel.exe.' With Microsoft Teams, a payload is added to its folder and executed automatically using certain commands. These commands can be used with other arguments, including 'download,' which enables retrieving the payload in the form of a NuGet package from a remote location.  The same method is valid for "squirrel.exe," which is also part of the Microsoft Teams installation package. Both executables are now part of the Living Off The Land Binaries and Scripts database on GitHub. Reverse engineer Reegun Richard tested the issue on Microsoft Teams and reported it to the company on June 4. The application continues to be vulnerable at this point as Microsoft informed the researcher that the fix would come in a future release of the software. Trying to replicate the effect with GitHub, and WhatsApp, and UiPath did not achieve execution for the payload and only downloading it from a remote server was possible. "In this scenario, an attacker can use this method to mask the payload download," which is still useful for an adversary, Richard told BleepingComputer. If you use Microsoft Teams, you surely want to learn more about this security infraction and visit OUR FORUM.