CamScanner, one of the most popular mobile apps is no more available on the Google play store. The app, which converts photos to the PDF format has overtime earner more than 100 million downloaded.
The app was removed from the store after a report by security giant Kaspersky titled “Malicious Android app had more than 100 million downloads in Google Play” went live.
According to the piece, Kaspersky products detected a malicious “module as Trojan Dropper.AndroidOS.Necro.n, which we have observed in some apps preinstalled on Chinese smartphones. As the name suggests, the module is a Trojan Dropper. That means the module extracts and runs another malicious module from an encrypted file included in the app’s resources. This “dropped” malware, in turn, is a Trojan Downloader that downloads more malicious modules depending on what its creators are up to at the moment.”
ATTENTION, ALL ANDROID USERS! To address your recent concerns, we are here to make the following statement and you may download the new version: https://t.co/79tt0IrMdw pic.twitter.com/Er1bE1qcuB
— CamScanner (@CamScanner) August 28, 2019
CamScanner’s Take
A day after the piece went live the said app company posted a tweet saying, “ATTENTION, ALL ANDROID USERS! To address your recent concerns, we are here to make the following statement and you may download the new version.”
They wrote that the team has detected that the advertisement SDK provided by Adhub-A third party contained malicious module. They futher added, “we have removed all the ads SDKs not certified by Google Play and a new version would be released.”
What should the app users do?
Take a backup of the documents you have taken with CamScanner.
Alternatively one can use Google Drive app or Microsoft Office Lens to continue scanning documents with similar ease.