Meta (Facebook) has suggested that about one million users of the social networking platform would have been compromised if they downloaded one of the hundreds of malicious applications on their smartphones.
According to the “Axios” website, the team in charge of security in the company “Meta”, published a report on this problem, on Friday morning, revealing that hundreds of sites that appear to be safe because they help modify images and so on, lure the user to allow them to access the password.
The report indicated that 355 of these malicious applications are present on phones running the “Android” operating system, while the number of applications reached 47 among “Ios” users. The researchers pointed out that 40 percent of those malicious applications claim to provide image-editing services, along with others specialized in areas such as games and business.
Experts explain that this penetration begins when web developers create malicious applications, under the banner of required and normal services, and then display them in application stores. When the user downloads the application, he finds himself required to register through his account on the Facebook site, and when he does this step, the road becomes impassable to information theft.
When the user agrees to register for malicious applications that he does not know the truth about, through his Facebook account, he makes its owners able to access all the information he has on the platform. And the owners of these malicious applications may be able to access other information, such as email, if it is linked to a Facebook account and password.
David Agranovich, Meta's director of threat mitigation, told reporters that he could not provide an exact figure on the number of people likely to have had their passwords stolen due to malicious apps. The official at Meta added that it is estimated that about one million users may be exposed to the problem, while Google and Apple said that they removed these malicious applications immediately from their stores.
Google and Apple stress that their teams are keen to scrutinize every licensed application, but the screening process cannot detect all vulnerabilities. Meta advises users to be careful when they download an application that asks them to register through their Facebook account, because this step may serve as an entrance to hack their information.
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