Malicious android apps related to Olympics 2012 have been spotted

The Olympic Games currently ongoing in London, UK have confirmed to be one of the best attracts for online fraudsters and other online crooks: we’ve had Olympic-themed spam email messages holding harmful PDFs, bogus Olympic tickets websites, Olympic-themed sweepstakes frauds, we’ve seen that 80 percent of websites containing the keyword “olympics” are set up by fraudsters, and have seen even false cautions about Olympic-themed frauds that held malware themselves.

And now we can add Olympic-themed destructive Android mobile apps to that record.

Webroot investigators have lately identified an app that apparently reveals users combined 2012 Olympics news, but also collect their phonebook contact, reads their sms information, and gathers information about the device ID and location.

The app is called “London Olympics Widget”, and has a digital document declaring it was developed in New Delhi, India, making it pretty apparent that it’s not the official London 2012 mobile app.

“Obviously an app for Olympic news does not need all of the above functionality to show you who won the last gold medal,” Webroot points out and advises users to employ the practice of least privilege. “If an app that changes your background wallpaper wants access to your contact list, Twitter and Facebook account you should probably reconsider its use.”