Cyber criminals have created a fake Instagram app to earn money by taking advantage of all the hype surrounding Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram.
The Instagram photo effects filter and sharing app has been all over the news since Facebook bought it for $1 billion last week. The app has been downloaded more than 5 million times less than a week after being released.
According to sophos security researcher, the fake app looks like the legitimate one,but in the background it secretly sends SMS to a premium rate numbers. This earns money for its creator.
Malware writer include a picture of a man inside the .APK file. Researcher believe the picture has been included multiple times for changing the fingerprint of the .APK.
"We have no idea who the man is or whether there is a reason why his picture has been chosen to include in the download."Researcher said.
"Could he be the malware author? A family friend? A celebrity? Someone who the malware author has a bone to pick with? "
Sophos security solutions detect the malware as Andr/Boxer-F.
