Minecraft – one of the most popular games has been exploited by cyber criminals.
Most recently the experts from ESET company have reported that the Google Play app store contains 87 apps for popular Minecraft game that in reality are malicious malwares disguised as mods. So far the harmful apps have been installed by almost 1 million of Android users.

Among the identified fake mods, 14 were responsible of displaying aggressive advertisement banners while the remaining 73 were redirecting the users to scam websites. ESET security software detects those threats as Android/TrojanDownloader.Agent.JL (ad-displaying downloaders) and Android/FakeApp.FG (fake apps).

Moreover, the language of the scareware advertisements was based on the geographic location of the infected device – which is a common practice in ransomware.

Fortunatly, the experts from ESET have provided an instruction (http://www.eset.pl/O_nas/Centrum_prasowe/Aktualnosci,news_id,12806) on how to manually remove the  malicious apps. They also recommend that the users should refrain from downloading apps from unofficial sources and use up-to-date mobile security product (for example ESET Mobile Security).