So there I was on the bluestacks website to download the software from the legitimate source and when I clicked on the “download for pc” button, an executable named “ThinInstaller_native” began downloading.
Once the downloading was complete I got a browser warning, “The software may be harmful and may cause damage to your system”.
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How could I proceed???
I thought of doing some initial double checking to ensure that the software is safe and would not perform any malicious activities in the background.
So I began with uploading the downloaded executable to the online virus scanner.
Trojan-Downloader is a type of trojan that installs itself to the system and utilizes the underlying Internet connection to connect to a remote server or website in order to download additional programs (usually malicious in nature) onto the infected computer.
On digging further it was found using another virus scanner that the executable had a threat score of 90 on a scale of 100.
As a threat to the overall system security, the application modified system certificate settings and queries/modified the display settings of system associated file extensions.
Alongside the application allocated virtual memory in foreign process, wrote data to a remote process.
The software was found communicating with remote servers which could lead to execution of remote code.
Bluestacks, the famous android emulator never seemed so mischievous in the first go!!!