Shopper

Shopper is the name of a malware family that is compatible with Android devices and has been very active in the past few months. A large portion of the active instances of Shopper are installed on mobile devices in Russia, so this appears to be the region that the authors of the Shopper Trojan prioritize. However, cybersecurity researchers add that this Trojan family is also very active in India and Brazil. The Shopper Trojan is not spectacular in terms of functionality, and it appears that click-fraud is its primary goal – it is able to hijack the user's account to create fake reviews of selected applications, as well as to increase their number of downloads artificially. Last but not least, the Shopper malware also may inject advertisements in the device's home screen or notification panel, therefore causing a minor inconvenience.

The cybercriminals behind the Shopper campaign are likely to spread their threatening application by taking advantage of several propagation techniques – copies of the Shopper Trojan may be spread via fake downloads, applications hosted on 3rd-party application stores, etc. The fake applications often may have fake reviews and an artificially boosted number of downloads to trick users and make them think that they are about to download a legitimate tool.

Although Shopper's functionality is limited to spawning advertisements and generating reviews and downloads for selected applications, the Trojan supports some worrisome features – it can read the information displayed on the user's screen, and even interact with active applications and prompts. The removal of Shopper can be a tricky task, too, because this application will not show up in the list of installed applications, nor can it be found on the phone's menu.

If your phone appears to be generating a lot of network traffic for no reason, and you keep being bombarded with advertisements for various applications, services, and products, then the Shopper malware might be the cause for this behavior. To resolve the issue, you should run a trustworthy mobile security product that can scan your device for unsafe files and ensure their full removal.