Not only affect the security of personal data, FaceApp also shows another risk of unpredictable

Over the past few days, FaceApp application has created a fever for users when being able to turn the user face from young to old or vice versa. Not only is the danger from having applications access to personal data of users, the emergence of FaceApp also shows a more ominous threat.

According to Yeo Siang Tiong, general manager of Kaspersky Southeast Asia, the fact that everyone installed FaceApp and shared images created by this application shows that they are being swept into the FOMO state (or Fear). Of Missing Out – fear of missing something) when following online trends.

That makes it easy for users to ignore basic security habits – like being wary of granting application permissions. Now the user has the habit of pressing the accept for all the messages that the application offers.

According to research by Kaspersky in 2016, about 63% of users do not read the user agreement and 43% of users mark all requests for data access when installing new applications. Most likely, this habit has not changed to this day.

This becomes especially dangerous when users can accidentally grant malicious applications access to private data such as contacts, photos, messages, even into your system files. suffered. Not only does it violate privacy, it also allows hackers to take advantage of it to spread malicious code.

More dangerous, when the FOMO effect also makes it possible for users to quickly install a fake application from unofficial sources. Experts from Kaspersky have discovered a fake FaceApp application, created to deceive users to install.

A user said, after installing FaceApp, this application scans and uploads all photos in the computer to the server.

This fake application makes mobile device of malicious victim containing adware module called MobiDash. When a fake application is installed on a user’s device, the malicious module will secretly install and then start displaying ads on the user’s device.

According to Kaspersky data, about 500 users had problems displaying ads from this fake application, just two days after it appeared from July 7, 2019. Besides the above display advertising module, there are nearly 800 different modules that have been identified in these malicious applications.

Igor Golovin, a security researcher at Kaspersky, said: ” The people behind MobiDash often hide their adware modules under the cover of popular applications and services. This means activities. The fake FaceApp’s actions are going strong, with hundreds of targeted attacks in just a few days, and we recommend users not to download applications from unofficial sources, and to install solutions security on your device to avoid any damage caused by malicious code . “.