Minecraft mods caught serving adware on Google Play Store

Kaspersky, one of the leading security companies in the world, has raised warning alarms for the players of Minecraft. 

The company said on Tuesday that the popular game from Xbox Studios is being exploited by threat actors to carry out malicious activities. 

Apparently, they are dropping modpacks on Google Play Store, which claim to offer additional elements for the game but actually inject adware on the users’ device. 

Last year in November, the company found more than 20 applications of this kind, which were later removed from the Google Play Store.  

Now, more such apps have landed on the marketplace to exploit unsuspecting Minecraft players. 

“Unfortunately, deleting applications from official stores does not always lead to victory over the malware. We see that the developers upload new modified versions to the store - under different names and different developer accounts,” Igor Golovin, security expert at Kaspersky, said in a statement. 

While the company did not reveal the names of the apps in question, it did confirm that many of the lot deliver programs that bombard a device with full-screen advertisements, even when the application is not working.  

A few of them load additional modules capable of hiding the icon of the app and launching pages on third party apps such as the default web browser, Google Play Store, and YouTube.  

It remains unclear whether the apps remain on Play Store or have been removed. Queries sent by TechCircle remained unanswered at the time of publishing. 

Other than this, Kaspersky has also discovered malicious applications that carry out phishing activities and steal social media credentials. One of these was a fake ad network app which stole users’ Facebook credentials.