# The new SparkKitty Trojan spy in the App Store and Google Play Source: https://securelist.com/sparkkitty-ios-android-malware/116793 Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/The-new-SparkKitty-Trojan-spy-in-the-App-Store-and-Google-Play?index=0x685a5967832354cd60ecb7bd19fa0a58da5730e5b7b2c19c3b434be61bece8cddbdab678 Submitted by misha on 2025-06-24 UTC, 7 upvotes, 1 comment ## Summary Kaspersky researchers report a new spyware Trojan, which they believe is connected to the earlier SparkCat campaign, that has reached the official App Store and Google Play and targets victims' cryptocurrency assets. The malware was found in modified TikTok apps and in a fake App Store page distributing iOS apps through Apple Enterprise provisioning profiles. The iOS version disguises a malicious module as AFNetworking.framework and, after gaining access to the photo gallery, uploads images to command-and-control servers, with a subset using OCR to select images of interest. The campaign has been active since at least February 2024, and Apple removed the malicious app from the App Store on 25.06.2025. ## Article Update 25.06.2025: Apple removed the malicious app from the App Store. In January 2025, we uncovered the SparkCat spyware campaign, which was aimed at gaining access to victims’ crypto wallets. The threat actor distributed apps containing a malicious SDK/framework. This component would wait for a user to open a specific screen (typically a support chat), then request access to the device’s gallery. It would then use an OCR model to select and exfiltrate images of interest. Although SparkCat was capable of searching for any text within images, that campaign specifically targeted photos containing seed phrases for crypto wallets. The malware was distributed through unofficial sources as well as Google Play and App Store. Now, we’ve once again come across a new type of spyware that has managed to infiltrate the official app stores. We believe it is connected to SparkCat and also targets the cryptocurrency assets of its victims. Here are the key facts about this new threat: The malware targets both iOS and Android devices, and it is spreading in the wild as well as through the App Store and Google Play. The app is already removed from the latter. On iOS, the malicious payload is delivered as frameworks (primarily mimicking AFNetworking.framework or Alamofire.framework) or obfuscated libraries disguised as libswiftDarwin.dylib, or it can be embedded directly into the app itself. The Android-specific Trojan comes in both Java and Kotlin flavors; the Kotlin version is a malicious Xposed module. While most versions of this malware indiscriminately steal all images, we discovered a related malicious activity cluster that uses OCR to pick specific pictures. The campaign has been active since at least February 2024. It all began with a suspicious online store… During routine monitoring of suspicious links, we stumbled upon several similar-looking pages that were distributing TikTok mods for Android. In these modified versions, the app’s main activities would trigger additional code. The code would then request a Base64-encoded configuration file from hxxps://moabc[.]vip/?dev=az. A sample decoded configuration file is shown below. { "links": { "shopCenter": "https://h1997.tiktokapp.club/wap/?", "goodsList": "https://h1997.tiktokapp.club/www/?", "orderList": "https://h1997.tiktokapp.club/www/?", "reg": "https://www.baidu.com", "footbar": "https://www.baidu.com" } } The links from the configuration file were displayed as buttons within the app. Tapping these opened WebView, revealing an online store named TikToki Mall that accepted cryptocurrency as payment for consumer goods. Unfortunately, we couldn’t verify if it was a legitimate store, as users had to register with an invitation code to make a purchase. Although we didn’t find any other suspicious functionality within the apps, a gut feeling told us to dig deeper. We decided to examine the code of the web pages distributing the apps, only to find a number of interesting details suggesting they might also be pushing iOS apps.