- May 4, 2019
- 833
Prior to the establishment of the App Defense Alliance, we discovered the first Android clipper on Google Play, which led to Google improving Android security by restricting system-wide clipboard operations for apps running in the background for Android versions 10 and higher. As is unfortunately shown by our latest findings, this action did not succeed in weeding the problem out completely: not only did we identify the first instant messaging clippers, we uncovered several clusters of them. The main purpose of the clippers we discovered is to intercept the victim’s messaging communications and replace any sent and received cryptocurrency wallet addresses with addresses belonging to the attackers. In addition to the trojanized WhatsApp and Telegram Android apps, we also found trojanized Windows versions of the same apps.

Not‑so‑private messaging: Trojanized WhatsApp and Telegram apps go after cryptocurrency wallets | WeLiveSecurity
ESET researchers analyzed Android and Windows clippers that can tamper with instant messages and use OCR to steal cryptocurrency funds.