OREANDA-NEWS. The Barcode Scanner application for Android smartphones turned out to be malicious after the last update. This is reported on the official blog of the Malwarebytes antivirus program.

At the end of December, the company began to receive complaints from users that their smartphones were opening ads in the browser without their knowledge. At the same time, none of them installed third-party applications, they downloaded all programs from the official Google Play store, the publication notes.

According to the developers of the antivirus, after verification it turned out that during the last update, the developer of LAVABIRD LTD added malicious code to its Barcode Scanner application, which launched ads on users' smartphones. The message clarifies that the code has been carefully hidden.

Malwarebytes employees showed the results of their Google Play research. The dangerous application has now been removed from the online store. However, for several years of work, more than ten million users managed to download it.

Previously, a rating of the most popular applications of early 2021 was published, which users downloaded most often. In the first place was Pavel Durov's Telegram messenger - already in the first month of 2021, Telegram was installed 63 million times, which is 4 times more than in the same period last year. In second place was the Chinese short video service TikTok - it was installed 62 million times.