Minecraft players have just been recently warned by ESET with regards to the increasing number of fake Minecraft apps that have been discovered on the Google Play Store. According to the noted IT security firm, there are more than 30 fake games that have already been found on the app store, and majority of which have been confirmed to be malicious, according to Tech Times.

As indicated in the report, the first malicious Minecraft app that was discovered had appeared in the Play Store in August of last year. After the scareware, a lot more mushroomed, leading the firm to admit that these apps may have already been downloaded by unknowing victims 600,000 to 2.8 million times already.

Minecraft gamers are reportedly lured by these malicious apps by using very interesting Minecraft icons. Although they are fake, they closely resemble the icons of the original Minecraft games. Once they are downloaded, however, the users experience nothing but problems.

Simple in-app actions, such as clicking Options, Exit, or Start will prompt an alert message to pop up – suggesting that the user’s system has been infected. This alert message also has an option that allow users to remove or uninstall the fake Minecraft app – thus, giving the user a notion that clicking the pop-up will remove the malware, as ESET’s Lucas Stefanko pointed out to Irish Examiner.

“Clicking on the alert leads to another step of the scam – several websites with more scareware messages,” Stefanko revealed. “One of these websites tries to appear as if they belonged to the legitimate anti-virus vendor, G-Data.”

Many of those who downloaded the game were quick to assume that the apps were safe, primarily because they were on the Play Store. However, the report had also mentioned that the Google Play Store has actually had some history with malicious apps. Now, with the help of Bouncer bot, Google is going to clean the Play Store – ridding it of malicious apps.

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