I reported this malware app on both my devices and suggest everyone do the same. It's up to no good.

I also reported this on September 21st, after someone alerted me to this on Twitter.[1]

To think that uBlock Origin itself was suspended from the store back in April because its icon resembled too much that of the other uBlock.[2]

[1] https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/646059022790037504

[2] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/issues/50

It even steals the real uBlock Origin's icon. That's incredibly sketchy.

This is what happens when you have an "app store" with no approval or review process. Google should be cracking down on this, just like those ads they were displaying[1] which would serve up malware-infected versions of Firefox whenever someone searched for "Firefox".

[1] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/websearch/IFl...

I reported an issue with spoofing on the Google play store about 6 months ago. They told me there was no timeframe for the fix, and no fix yet as far as I'm aware. Maybe if I post it here someone from google will do something...

Just so everyone is aware, you can use any email address as your company email address on the google play store without verification. This means when looking at an app, you see the email is [email protected] and think it's from them, but it's not.

A lot of people lost bitcoins because of the malicious ad problem. Somebody spoofed blockchain.info and stole a bunch of credentials... The entire bitcoin subreddit reported it, yet 2 months later it was back up.

Wow; that's quite malicious.

Question for HN: back in the Napster days, were there likewise Napster clones ("napster"?) that purported to allow peer to peer music downloads but in fact had malware properties?

I don't remember any, but then again, I don't know when I (or most people) would have come across them if such a thing existed. If you wanted Napster, you just went to napster.com and downloaded it. There wasn't a gameable walled-garden app store like you have to go through to get uBlock Origin.

There were (and still are) sites hawking anything popular - games, porn, desktop apps, etc. If someone was lucky, they ended up with a bunch of adware slowing their computer down. Worse scenarios involved things like programs which would surreptitiously hang up your dialup connection and redial the equivalent of a 900 number in some country where the scammer could pay off the local police.

Search for something like "flash update" on non-Google/DDG search engines and look at the top ads if you want the general feel.

I don't think stuff like that became popular until BitTorrent and other distributed filesharing protocols and clients came about. Lots of people were tricked into installing malware while trying to download warez and porn, though.

Frigging Google and it's shitty app stores.