Your smartphone, be it an Apple iPhone or any of the myriad Android models, goes everywhere with you, knows everything about you, and puts you in the crosshairs of hackers worldwide. You’ve likely read about AI-powered threats that have led to the FBI advising all smartphone users to deploy a secret code if they take certain calls, and you will be aware of dangerous SMS text messages. Now, security researchers at Kaspersky have warned that a malicious new campaign has infiltrated both the Apple App Store and Google Play with malware that steals all your photos. All. Of. Them. Here’s everything you need to know about the SparkKitty threat.
How SparkKitty Targets Android And iPhone Devices
Smartphone apps: you can’t live without them, and neither can hackers. Earlier this year, I reported how researchers at Bitdefender had uncovered more than 300 malicious apps that had made their way into the Google Play App Store and were consequently downloaded 60 million times. No wonder 1 in 4 Americans think that someone is spying on their Android or iPhone smartphone. But threats aren’t all about big numbers; just one malicious app can do a lot of costly damage. Researchers at Kaspersky have uncovered such an app, one that has made its way into both the official app stores, targeting Android and iPhone users in the most insidious way.
“We’ve once again come across a new type of spyware that has managed to infiltrate the official app stores,” Sergey Puzan and Dmitry Kalinin, malware analysts working at Kaspersky, said in a June 23 report. Rather worryingly, the threat campaign is known to have been active since at least February 2024, the report confirmed.
Rather worrying is somewhat of an understatement when you realize that the SparkKitty malware will indiscriminately steal all the images from your smartphone photo gallery. Just let that sink in for a moment.
The report revealed that the malware could be related to an earlier threat called SparkCat, which specifically targeted images of cryptocurrency wallet recovery “seed” phrases stored on the infected phone.
The apps have both been removed from the respective app stores at the time of writing. The apps were, Kaspersky has said, 币coin on the iPhone and SOEX on Android. If you have either on your smartphone, delete it immediately.
A Google spokesperson said that the developer of the Android app has now been banned, and that “Android users are automatically protected against this app regardless of download source by Google Play Protect, which is on by default on Android devices with Google Play Services.”
I have reached out to Apple for a statement.
