Counterfeit Rovio games for Chrome are hijacking the browser
October 9, 2012 by Network Security
Filed under News
The reputation of Rovio’s Angry Birds game and its development features are a assurance for the achievements of their recently launched Bad Piggies game, but unfortunately for those who would like to perform it, it is still available only to iPhone, iPad and Android operating system mobile phones.
This situation performs perfectly into the arms of online fraudsters who, due to well-known need, made the decision to “offer” Chrome customers the possibility of enjoying all of these games.
When looking for them in the Chrome web shop, customers are provided with almost the whole variety of Rovio’s games and a few invented names, but the more intelligent ones can observe that the detailed creator is not Rovio, but Playook (www.playook.info).
“A quick glance at the Whois records for playook.info tells us… nothing. They hide their name behind Whoisguard, a very suspicious thing for a business to do,” Barracuda Labs staff explains.
Another thing that should make users become wary is that when downloading the above mentioned apps, they all asked to allow them access the users’ data for all websites (see the screenshot below):
Those customers that, despite all of this, continue with the set up of the games are stuck with a gametitle that not only is not the desired one, but that it also sets up a plug-in that will provide additional contributes in a number of well-known sites such as google.com, imdb.com, auction web sites.com, fb.com, and many, many others.
The fraudsters behind these plug-ins obviously get compensated for displaying these additional ads, and while the hyperlinks in them can be completely simple, they can also deliver other viruses and additional frauds.
As always, users are recommended to really think twice about the authorizations they allow to plug-ins and apps, and if they don’t look legit, to stop installing them. This guidance is worth be repeated again and again, as obviously there are always those who don’t know better – as confirmed by the 82,500+ downloading these “games” have handled to sum up.
