Google warns this phone hack can take control of your bank account in seconds

Billions of Android users across the globe have been warned of a scary✅ new attack that happens when you least expect it.

Hackers have found a way to scam people when they think their phone is swi♊tched off.

In reality, the cyber crooks have added a fake black screen to hide what they’re up to underneath.

They even remotely set the brightness to zero and disable notifications, so victims don’t get suspicious.

This means they can go and do what they like on your phone without you knowing anything is going 🥂on.

The malware lets the🐎m tap, write, copy and modify what they see as if they were holding the phone in their hands.

Even more worrying, 🥃it is also capable of monitoring your actions, which comes in particularly useful for getting hold of sensitive PINs and passwords.

It’s a form of on-device fraud and banking malware called Octo.

And according💯 to experts, it has already appeared in th▨e wild.

Threat Fabric found it available on the , where some of the worst ꦓnet criminals lurk.

Most of them use fake web browser or Google Play Store app update notices on the internet to get peopl༒e to download the malware.

And an app called Fast Cleaner, which had 50,0♐00 installs, was also found to contain Oct⛦o.

It was removed from the Play Store in February.

Octo is actually a variant of a nasty trojan called ExobotCompact that w꧋as aroun🅷d in 2018.

“ExobotCompact/Octo has dangerous capabilities, powered by inventive distribution schemes including droppers on official Google Play store and malicious landing pages,” Threat Fabric said.

“Thus, customers are very likely to fall into installing the malware on their devices, allowing the actors to have remote access to their devices and therefore to their banking accounts.”

This story originally appeared and was reproduced here with permission.