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Fake Korean bank applications for Android – Pt 3

18
Mar
2014

Recently, we discovered an account on GitHub, a service for software development projects, that has interesting contents. The account contains several projects; one of the latest ones is called Banks, and it has interesting source codes.  The account contains information like user name, photo, and email address, but we cannot tell who the guy in the picture is. He might not be related to the contents at all, it could be a fake picture, fake name, or simply his account may have been hacked, his identity stolen, and the Banks repository created by someone else without his consent. In this blog post, we will explore the source codes in detail.
korea-03

When we downloaded the repository, we found several directories – GoogleService and fake applications imitating mobile applications of five major Korean banks – NH Bank, Kookmin Bank, Hana Bank, ShinHan Bank and Woori Bank.

korea-02

We previously published two blog posts with analyses of the above mentioned fake applications.

When we look at GitHub statistics, and Punchcard tab, it tells us what time the creators were most active. From the chart below you can see, that Saturday mornings and evenings and Sunday evenings were the most active times of comments of new versions. It seems that authors of this application do the development as a weekend job. At the time of writing this blogpost, the last update of fake bank applications was in the beginning of January 2014.

korea-20

This is not the first attack against users of Korean banks. About a year ago, we published this analysis.

Conclusion

Github, the web-based hosting service for software development projects, offers a lot of interesting contents, which depending on its settings can be later found and accessed by virtually anyone, including Google robots.  We managed to find the above mentioned repository by simply Googling the strings which occurred in a malicious Android application.

Acknowledgement:

The author would like to thank to Peter Kalnai and David Fiser for help and consultations related to this analysis.

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