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A recent scoop by Reuters revealed that mobile apps for the U.S. Army and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were integrating software that sends visitor data to a Russian company called Pushwoosh, which claims to be based in the United States. But that story omitted an important historical detail about Pushwoosh: In 2013, one of its developers admitted to authoring the Pincer Trojan, malware designed to surreptitiously intercept and forward text messages from Android mobile devices.
Pushwoosh says it is a U.S. based company that provides code for software developers to profile smartphone app users based on their online activity, allowing them to send tailor-made notifications. But a recent investigation by Reuters raised questions about the company’s real location and truthfulness.
The Army told Reuters it removed an app containing Pushwoosh in March, citing “security concerns.” The Army app was used by soldiers at one of the nation’s main combat training bases.
Reuters said the CDC likewise recently removed Pushwoosh code from its app over security concerns, after reporters informed the agency Pushwoosh was not based in the Washington D.C. area — as the company had represented — but was instead operated from Novosibirsk, Russia.
Pushwoosh’s software also was found in apps for “a wide array of international companies, influential nonprofits and government agencies from global consumer goods company Unilever and the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) to the politically powerful U.S. gun lobby, the National Rifle Association (NRA), and Britain’s Labour Party.”
The company’s founder Max Konev told Reuters Pushwoosh “has no connection with the Russian government of any kind” and that it stores its data in the United States and Germany.
But Reuters found that while Pushwoosh’s social media and U.S. regulatory filings present it as a U.S. company based variously in California, Maryland and Washington, D.C., the company’s employees are located in Novosibirsk, Russia.
Reuters also learned that the company’s address in California does not exist, and that two LinkedIn accounts for Pushwoosh employees in Washington, D.C. were fake.
“Pushwoosh never mentioned it was Russian-based in eight annual filings in the U.S. state of Delaware, where it is registered, an omission which could violate state law,” Reuters reported.
Pushwoosh admitted the LinkedIn profiles were fake, but said they were created by a marketing firm to drum up business for the company — not misrepresent its location.
Pushwoosh told Reuters it used addresses in the Washington, D.C. area to “receive business correspondence” during the coronavirus pandemic. A review of the Pushwoosh founder’s online presence via Constella Intelligence shows his Pushwoosh email address was tied to a phone number in Washington, D.C. that was also connected to email addresses and account profiles for over a dozen other Pushwoosh employees.
Pushwoosh was incorporated in Novosibirsk, Russia in 2016.
The dust-up over Pushwoosh came in part from data gathered by Zach Edwards, a security researcher who until recently worked for the Internet Safety Labs, a nonprofit organization that funds research into online threats.
Edwards said Pushwoosh began as Arello-Mobile, and for several years the two co-branded — appearing side by side at various technology expos. Around 2016, he said, the two companies both started using the Pushwoosh name.
A search on Pushwoosh’s code base shows that one of the company’s longtime developers is a 41-year-old from Novosibirsk named Yuri Shmakov. In 2013, KrebsOnSecurity interviewed Shmakov for the story, “Who Wrote the Pincer Android Trojan?” wherein Shmakov acknowledged writing the malware as a freelance project.
Shmakov told me that, based on the client’s specifications, he suspected it might ultimately be put to nefarious uses. Even so, he completed the job and signed his work by including his nickname in the app’s code.
“I was working on this app for some months, and I was hoping that it would be really helpful,” Shmakov wrote. “[The] idea of this app is that you can set it up as a spam filter…block some calls and SMS remotely, from a Web service. I hoped that this will be [some kind of] blacklist, with logging about blocked [messages/calls]. But of course, I understood that client [did] not really want this.”
Shmakov did not respond to requests for comment. His LinkedIn profile says he stopped working for Arello Mobile in 2016, and that he currently is employed full-time as the Android team leader at an online betting company.
In a blog post responding to the Reuters story, Pushwoosh said it is a privately held company incorporated under the state laws of Delaware, USA, and that Pushwoosh Inc. was never owned by any company registered in the Russian Federation.
“Pushwoosh Inc. used to outsource development parts of the product to the Russian company in Novosibirsk, mentioned in the article,” the company said. “However, in February 2022, Pushwoosh Inc. terminated the contract.”
However, Edwards noted that dozens of developer subdomains on Pushwoosh’s main domain still point to JSC Avantel, an Internet provider based in Novosibirsk, Russia.
Pushwoosh employees posing at a company laser tag event.
Edwards said the U.S. Army’s app had a custom Pushwoosh configuration that did not appear on any other customer implementation.
“It had an extremely custom setup that existed nowhere else,” Edwards said. “Originally, it was an in-app Web browser, where it integrated a Pushwoosh javascript so that any time a user clicked on links, data went out to Pushwoosh and they could push back whatever they wanted through the in-app browser.”
An Army Times article published the day after the Reuters story ran said at least 1,000 people downloaded the app, which “delivered updates for troops at the National Training Center on Fort Irwin, Calif., a critical waypoint for deploying units to test their battlefield prowess before heading overseas.”
In April 2022, roughly 4,500 Army personnel converged on the National Training Center for a war games exercise on how to use lessons learned from Russia’s war against Ukraine to prepare for future fights against a major adversary such as Russia or China.
Edwards said despite Pushwoosh’s many prevarications, the company’s software doesn’t appear to have done anything untoward to its customers or users.
“Nothing they did has been seen to be malicious,” he said. “Other than completely lying about where they are, where their data is being hosted, and where they have infrastructure.”
Edwards also found Pushwoosh’s technology embedded in nearly two dozen mobile apps that were sold to cities and towns across Illinois as a way to help citizens access general information about their local communities and officials.
The Illinois apps that bundled Pushwoosh’s technology were produced by a company called Government 311, which is owned by Bill McCarty, the current director of the Springfield Office of Budget and Management. A 2014 story in The State Journal-Register said Gov 311’s pricing was based on population, and that the app would cost around $2,500 per year for a city with approximately 25,000 people.
McCarty told KrebsOnSecurity that his company stopped using Pushwoosh “years ago,” and that it now relies on its own technology to provide push notifications through its 311 apps.
But Edwards found some of the 311 apps still try to phone home to Pushwoosh, such as the 311 app for Riverton, Ill.
“Riverton ceased being a client several years ago, which [is] probably why their app was never updated to change out Pushwoosh,” McCarty explained. “We are in the process of updating all client apps and a website refresh. As part of that, old unused apps like Riverton 311 will be deleted.”
Edwards said it’s far from clear how many other state and local government apps and Web sites rely on technology that sends user data to U.S. adversaries overseas. In July, Congress introduced an amended version of the Intelligence Authorization Act for 2023, which included a new section focusing on data drawn from online ad auctions that could be used to geolocate individuals or gain other information about them.
Business Insider reports that if this section makes it into the final version — which the Senate also has to pass — the Office for the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) will have 60 days after the Act becomes law to produce a risk assessment. The assessment will look into “the counterintelligence risks of, and the exposure of intelligence community personnel to, tracking by foreign adversaries through advertising technology data,” the Act states.
Edwards says he’s hoping those changes pass, because what he found with Pushwoosh is likely just a drop in a bucket.
“I’m hoping that Congress acts on that,” he said. “If they were to put a requirement that there’s an annual audit of risks from foreign ad tech, that would at least force people to identify and document those connections.”
Happy National App Day! No, we don’t mean apps of the mozzarella stick and potato skin variety, but your mobile apps that let you order dinner, hail a taxi, stay connected to your friends, and entertain you for hours with silly videos. While they’re undoubtedly useful, mobile apps are also a weak spot in some people’s digital safety. Cybercriminals take every chance they get to trick people through all kinds of technology, and mobile apps are no exception.
To celebrate National App Day, here are a few tips to keep your mobile and your personally identifiable information (PII) safe.
Did you know that there are hundreds of apps on the Android and Apple app stores whose only aim is to steal your passwords? In 2022, Meta identified more than 400 fake apps disguised as various utilities that targeted users to weasel Facebook login and password combinations.1 Malicious apps also regularly masquerade as photo editors and wallpapers but their real purpose is to run malware in the background of the mobile device, such as this Squid Game app from 2021.
Little-known apps aren’t the only ones you have to be wary of either. The biggest companies are also falling to cybercrime. For instance, more details recently came to light about a breach at Uber that leaked the PII of 57 million users. Plus, the popular mobile payment service, Cash App had the personal details of 8.3 million current and former users leaked.2
To keep your cellphone free of malicious software and your PII and password secure, take these five mobile security tips with you into the new year.
The new year is as good a time as any to unload any unnecessary baggage, emotional, literal, or in this case, digital. Go through your phone and delete the apps you haven’t used in the last six months. Make sure to completely delete your account with that app and not just hide it from your homepage. The smaller your digital footprint, the less at risk your PII is of being compromised in a breach.
Before you download any new app, it’s a good idea to conduct some background research on it. How many detailed reviews does it have? Who is the app developer? A phony app usually reveals itself through its lack of reviews. Consider apps with less than 50 reviews fishy. Skim the reviews for specific details and typos. If it’s lacking in detail but brimming with typos and grammatical mistakes, it could signal a fake. This research should take about five minutes, so don’t worry; it shouldn’t be too much of an inconvenience, and that time will be well spent.
Just like it’s a good idea to keep on top of global news, set up news alerts for cybersecurity breaches. If a company falls to a cybercriminal, the alert will give you the valuable time you need to act quickly to either delete your account or change your password.
For every online account, it is essential to create a unique password or passphrase. That way, if you do get hacked through an app or get tricked by a fake one, you don’t have to worry about cybercriminals using that password to walk into your other accounts. Password managers are an excellent way to keep all your passwords secure and free up your brain space for things other than dozens of passwords.
When you sign up for a new app, you can expect to give it a username, a password, and maybe your first name; however, if it has optional fields for your full birthday or your address, consider leaving those blank. The less information the company has about you, the less that can end up in cybercriminals’ hands if the app is breached.
The first step to better cyber habits is arming yourself with the knowledge of the threats that are out there. The best advice here is to slow down, observe and think about your next move every time you download a new app. The signs of a fake are usually not difficult to spot. Then, once you’re confident in its legitimacy, limit the amount of PII you share with it. In this digital world we live in, consider everyone susceptible to a breach.
To give you peace of mind, supplement your great habits with a tool, like McAfee+ Ultimate, that will cover all your bases and be your partner to live your best private life online.
1Tech.co, “Data Breaches That Have Happened in 2022 So Far.”
2Termly, “98 Biggest Data Breaches, Hacks, and Exposures.”
The post 2022’s Top 5 App Security Tips appeared first on McAfee Blog.
Happy Download Day! (Yes, there’s a day for that.) Today is an excellent day to share downloading best practices to keep all your devices safe from malicious content. It’s tempting to download “free” shows, movies, and video games, but the consequences of doing so can be quite expensive. All it takes is for one malicious download to compromise your identity or leak your banking information to cybercriminals.
Luckily, there are a few ways to keep your devices and personally identifiable information (PII) safe. Here’s how!
How many streaming services do you subscribe to? Two? Ten? No matter how many premium entertainment subscriptions you have, the hottest new show always seems to be on the channel you can’t access. This is a common scenario that often drives people to download episodes from websites that claim crystal-clear, safe downloads. In actuality, these sites could harbor malware, spyware, or other types of malware that lurk in the shadows until an unsuspecting person downloads them to their desktop, tablet, or cellphone.
Malware, which stands for malicious software, often hides behind legitimate-looking links or downloadable content. It’s only until it’s on your device that you realize there’s a criminal hiding behind it. For example, earlier in 2022, a ransomware program (a type of malware) disguised itself as a Microsoft system update. The criminal behind the scheme then threatened leaking or permanently deleting sensitive files if the person didn’t pay the ransom.
Once malware infects one device, some malware programs can infect an entire home network and spread to other connected devices.1 From there, the cybercriminal can steal the online shopping, banking, or personal details of a whole household and either sell their findings on the dark web or keep it for themselves.
Before you download anything to any of your devices, go through this checklist to help you determine the safety of most content:
Overall, while downloading entertainment for free is appealing to people on a budget, it’s better to avoid doing so altogether. The risk isn’t worth it. Consider scheduling a watch party with a friend or family member who has the subscription service you’re seeking.
In case you slip up and accidentally download malware, spyware, or ransomware, McAfee+ Ultimate can defend your devices, remove the software, and monitor the dark web to make sure your PII wasn’t compromised. McAfee antivirus is compatible with macOS, iOS, and Android devices and Chromebooks, so you can regularly scan all your devices for programs that shouldn’t be there. If the worst does happen and a cybercriminal gets a grip on your personal information, McAfee can back you up with $1 million in identity theft coverage and restoration and continuous identity monitoring.
Browse confidently and enjoy your devices to the fullest! Just remember these safe downloading tips and partner with McAfee for peace of mind.
1Federal Trade Commission, “Malware from illegal video streaming apps: What to know”
The post Celebrate National Download Day With This Safe Downloading Checklist appeared first on McAfee Blog.
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