Google recently made public that a number of digital certificates used by device manufactures were recently compromised and used to sign malicious Android apps. This would allow the malicious apps to be granted with software permissions that it shouldn’t have, allowing them the same level of access or authority as the Android OS process. Google said that the Android device manufactures have rolled out mitigations, including rotating keys and pushing out the fixes to users’ phones automatically. Google has also added scanner detections for any malware attempting to abuse the compromised certificates.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/apvi/issues/detail?id=100
https://www.wired.com/story/android-platform-certificates-malware/
This segment was created for the It’s 5:05 podcast