Also The notorious and persistent Joker malware infected another 17 apps in the Google Play Store An estimated 120,000 people who installed these apps may have been fraudulently registered for premium services without permission, and had their contact lists and SMS text messages stolen

All Joker-infected apps were removed from Google Play, and Google remotely disabled the apps on users' phones However, if you downloaded any of these apps, you must manually remove them from your device

These 17 apps were discovered by Zscaler ThreatLabZ, and the company posted a blog post about its discovery last week, stating that most of the apps were PDF scanners, messaging apps or photo editors One of these apps was listed twice by Zscaler, which could mean that two different apps had the same name

All of these malicious apps are detected by the best Android antivirus apps, so install and use these apps if you haven't already

Viral Gandhi of Zscaler wrote in a ThreatLabZ blog post, "We recommend that you pay close attention to the permission list of any app you install on your Android device "Always be on the lookout for dangerous permissions on SMS, call logs, contacts, etc Reading comments and reviews on app pages can also help identify dangerous apps

Joker is not the worst Android malware, but it is about to do some serious damage to your wallet and privacy It bypasses Google Play's security screening by appearing to be a harmless app and doesn't actually do anything malicious until some time after it's installed on a user's device

However, once the malicious part of the app is up and running, however, the joker will force users to sign up for expensive subscriptions that use an outdated wireless application protocol (WAP) billing mechanism dating back to the early 2000s, when few cell phones were capable of loading websites contracts

The trick with WAP billing is that you don't immediately see a bill Your credit card is not charged Instead, the bill is added to your phone bill, so you may not even notice if you are charged a few extra dollars over the normal amount

The joker also steals your cell phone contact list, no doubt spamming even more people

If this sounds familiar, that's because Google removed six more Joker-infected apps from the Play Store earlier this month; in July, 11 more were removed from Google Play And just a year ago, during the malware's big debut, 20 Joker-harmful apps were removed

This brings the total number of Joker-infected apps that have appeared on Google Play since the beginning of 2019 to 58 They will not be the last