Researchers across the globe are very much interested in having a good understanding of the vulnerabilities associated with the applications so that they can deal with things in a very systematic approach. Researchers in the city of Norway have discovered the android challenge that can be easily exploited to use any application to steal data or credentials and the name of this particular problem is Strandhogg. Strandhogg has very well derived its name from the ancient Viking tactic of the coastal raiding concept which was done with the motive of capturing the livestock and indigenous people who could be later on used as slaves. This was first discovered in December 2019 by the East European Security Company which was working in the financial sector. The company noticed that money was consistently disappearing from the bank accounts of separate customers in a specific city and researchers very well believe that Strandhogg will be allowing the attacks to launch sophisticated attacks without any requirement for an android device to be rooted.
Researchers also believe that attackers will be exploiting the operating system control with the help of task affinity to launch the attacks and further this will allow the application to assume any entity within the operating system. The researchers very well have pointed out that the vulnerability will stem from the multitasking features of the Android which will further provide people with a significant number of benefits associated with the task hiking attacks. This will provide the attacks with the ability to spoof the user interface and make The Spoofed entity look like a real user interface without the actual user getting to know about it.
Many experts believe that approximately more than the top 500 applications are consistently prone to this particular problem which very well justifies that the majority of the applications in the Android ecosystem are vulnerable. What makes the problem of Strandhogg unique is that it never requires any kind of routing element on behalf of devices to perform sophisticated attacks because it will never require any kind of permission in comparison to the normal application. This particular challenge can be exploited by the attacks very easily because it will provide them with the opportunity to cover up the application with any other option of a trustworthy user.
This particular Strandhogg problem has been very well exploited in the wild as a malicious application to steal the banking and login credentials of the device user. According to researchers in the world of Android security whenever the user opens the application on the device, it will display the fake user interface over the actual application which will eventually track the users into thinking that they are using a legitimate application. Therefore, whenever the user types their username and password into the application, Strandhogg will potentially steal the data, and the attacker in this particular case will be receiving the data instantly from the device. This concept very well provides people with accessibility to sensitive application applications like a banking application which could be later on problematic to be managed. This particular type of thing will also provide the malicious application with the opportunity to perform the privilege escalation by treating the users into granting permission which they usually do not allow. The permission to read text messages, the location data, listening to phone calls, and even the accessibility to the device camera could be easily compromised in this case if not paid attention to.
The problem of Strandhogg has been also taken notice of by the government as well because in India the number of smartphone users is highest after China and the overall penetration in the population is very high. On 16th of December 2019, the Indian Home Ministry was very successful in sending the alert to all of the provincial governments about the challenges associated with the Android operating system which were faced due to the problem of Strandhogg. This particular scenario was behaving as a genuine application but was providing accessibility to user data of all kinds. The information in this particular case was shared by the threat analytical unit of the Indian cybercrime coordination center in the Home Ministry and approximately 500 popular applications are at a very high risk of the particular problem. The alert was later sent to all of the senior police officials as well to sensitize them about the threats so that they could create awareness among the public on the problems associated with Strandhogg.
In the United States of America, the New Jersey Security and Communications Integration Cell is the unit of State Cyber Security Information sharing which further makes sure that incident reporting and component organizations are issuing the advisories associated with this particular concept. This point very well indicates that the device when will be infected, the application will be already logged in, and will be requesting a fresh login which makes sure that permission pop-ups have to be understood throughout the process. According to the researchers, Strandhogg is a problem that will happen when the users indulge themselves in multitasking, especially after switching between multiple tasks and processes. The Android operating system in this particular case is also using the technique known as the concept of task re-parenting which will divert the user to tapping on a genuine application but the malicious coding will be running in this particular case. According to the researchers, when the malicious applications were being distributed through the Google Play Store, they pay loads were very problematic to manage and eventually, this was pretending to have the same functionality as a popular game or application available in the industry.
Hence, over the past few years, the screen overlay attacks have significantly increased which is the main reason that every organization needs to take the concept of Strandhogg very seriously which is only possible whenever they will be availing the services of the experts at Appsealing to improve the existing levels of security. With this, Strandhogg will present a real challenge for android banking users which further will be giving hackers with accessibility to the wallet and key information. Hence, the techniques in this particular case have to be understood by the companies so that they can promote the protection during the runtime of the applications very easily.