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Tap Snake: Snake Clone That Spies On You

As of late there have been a bunch of reports about viruses either for Android phones or just technology in general. While most don’t even make the average user flinch, the one about the hidden premium text messages was pretty good. Enter Tap Snake. Tap Snake while being a mediocre Snake game clone has two hidden features.

What are these two hidden features? Well for starters the game won’t exit. It will run in the background and even restart when you reboot your phone. Alright a minor annoyance to say the least. Secondly, it will secretly report your phones GPS position to a server every 15 minutes. You can thank another Android application for this, GPS Spy.

When purchasing GPS Spy it will tell you to download the Tap Snake game onto the phone you want to spy. When downloaded, the game is registered with a keycode to enable spying. This would mean that physical access would be needed to make the user download and install this game to your phone to have it work. Just imagine if it didn’t need a keycode when installing it! Someone could spy on anyone with the game installed!

At this point it is now basically a trojan and F-Secure is classifying it as such. While little can come about knowing someone’s GPS location it is a good example of how inventive people are starting to get. Let this serve as a reminder to just make sure you know what you are downloading. We will post an article shortly on some ways to be sure you are getting what you are actually wanting when grabbing something off the Android market.

This entire thing was developed by a Russian programmer living in Texas, Mr. Max Lafshin. His developer name on the Android market is Maxicon. As of right now I can’t seem to access Tap Snake on the market so I’m assuming Google has already yanked it off.

Websites Referenced: PCWorld | F-Secure

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