Skip to main content Today in APIs: Content Experiments API, SOA Software's API Lifecycle Manager, and 10 New APIs Frames, Motions, Gestures: A Sneak Peek into the Leap Motion SDKRecently, other researchers reported that a new Android malware family (detected as ANDROIDOS_KAGECOIN.HBT) had cryptocurrency mining capabilities.Based on our analysis, we have found that this malware is involved in the mining for various digital currencies, including Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Dogecoin.This has real consequences for users: shorter battery life, increased wear and tear, all of which could lead to a shorter device lifespan.The researchers originally found ANDROIDOS_KAGECOIN as repacked copies of popular apps such as Football Manager Handheld and TuneIn Radio.The apps were injected with the CPU mining code from a legitimate Android cryptocurrency mining app; this code is based on the well-known cpuminer software.To hide the malicious code, the cybercriminal modified the Google Mobile Ads portion of the app, as seen below: Figure 1.

The modified Google Mobile Ads code The miner is started as a background service once it detects that the affected device is connected to the Internet.By default, it launches the CPU miner to connect to a dynamic domain, which then redirects to an anonymous Dogecoin mining pool.By February 17, his network of mobile miners has earned him thousands of Dogecoins.After February 17, the cybercriminal changed mining pools.The malware is configured to download a file, which contains the information necessary to update the configuration of the miner.This configuration file was updated, and it now connects to the well-known WafflePool mining pool.The Bitcoins mined have been paid out (i.e., transferred to the cybercriminal’s wallet) several times.Coin pool configuration code The coin-mining apps discussed above were found outside of the Google Play store, but we have found the same behavior in apps inside the Google Play store.These apps have been downloaded by millions of users, which means that there may be many Android devices out there being used to mine cryptocurrency for cybercriminals.

We detect this new malware family as  ANDROIDOS_KAGECOIN.HBTB.(As of this writing, these apps are still available.)Mining Apps in Google Play Figure 4.Download count of mining apps Analyzing the code of these apps reveal the cryptocurrency mining code inside.Unlike the other malicious apps, in these cases the mining only occurs when the device is charging, as the increased energy usage won’t be noticed as much.Cryptocurrency mining code The same miner configuration updating logic is also present here.Analyzing the configuration file, it seems that the cybercriminal responsible is switching into mining Litecoins.Configuration file, showing switch into LiteCoin mining We believe that with thousands of affected devices, cybercriminal accumulated a great deal of Dogecoins.Reading their app description and terms and conditions on the websites of these apps, users may not know that their devices may potentially be used as mining devices due to the murky language and vague terminology.

Clever as the attack is, whoever carried it out may not have thought things through.Phones do not have sufficient performance to serve as effective miners.Users will also quickly notice the odd behavior of the miners – slow charging and excessively hot phones will all be seen, making the miner’s presence not particularly stealthy.Yes, they can gain money this way, but at a glacial pace.bitcoin thrift storeUsers with phones and tablets that are suddenly charging slowly, running hot, or quickly running out of batteries may want to consider if they have been exposed to this or similar threats.bitcoin sms billingAlso, just because an app has been downloaded from an app store – even Google Play – does not mean it is safe.bitcoin millionaire appWe have informed the Google Play security team about this issue.ethereum big banks

Background ColoredCoins started in 2013 as method to push metadata to the Bitcoin blockchain, and evolved over the years to a vibrant ecosystem for digital currencies.As the open source community continues to develop, a consortium of stake-holders has formed with the realization that the blockchain movement will transform the way we do business in the future and that this revolution, much like the internet, will happen after standards will form around every layer of the stack.The ColoredCoins project taps into the biggest and the most successful crypto-currency ecosystem in the world, Bitcoin, and creates a blockchain agnostic framework for digital-currencies that will apply those best practices to traditional finance.bitcoin transaction id generatorFresh from our Blog Colored Coins and Lightning integration Get Social Join our mailing list Sendnfc bitcoin

We’re excited to announce our Android Wear app!If you have an Android watch, you should see it installed on your watch shortly after you install the app.Our motivation for our Android Wear integration was to surface a couple common uses without requiring users to pull out their phone.You can now check the latest Bitcoin price in your local currency as well as generate a bitcoin address shown as a QR code for receiving payments.With the Android Wear API being so new, we’d like to share a couple tips for building your own Android Wear app.The documentation is pretty clear about how to add your wear project as a dependency to your main application.Simply adding wearApp project(‘:wearable’) to your app’s build.gradle.However, in order for your app to appear on the watch, the wear app’s versionCode must match your main app’s.Updating both of these for each release is tedious and error prone.So let’s pull these out to the project’s root build gradle and import that in each app’s build.gradle file.

Here is what the relevant pieces look like.Android Studio currently shows a warning in the editor about not being able to infer types, but this works just fine.One issue we ran into was that resources can sometimes take too long to load and therefore fail to be rendered.Even simple ones like a gradient drawable defined in XML.The GridViewPager sample project included in the Android 21 SDK has an elegant solution for this.In it, you’ll see the FragmentGridPagerAdapter is responsible for defining the background for each page, however the background may be an image that needs to be fetched from the phone or just a drawable that needs to be inflated.Because these operations are particularly expensive on Android Wear, these tasks need to be done asynchronously, their dependents notified, and their results cached.The source we are interested in can be found here and we’ve attached it at the bottom of the post./android-sdk/samples/android-21/wearable/GridViewPager/Wearable/src/main/java/com/example/android/wearable/gridviewpager/SampleGridPagerAdapter.javaWe are really excited to about this and hope you find both the update and tips useful.