Google finds spyware on the Play Store: it had access to Facebook, LinkedIn, and even Telegram

With the announcement of Android 8 Oreo, Google also launched Play Protect — a new program that is there to perform periodic checks of the software that's on your phone and the apps that are in the Play Store, looking for evil-doing malware. Recently, Google found a family of spyware apps that sound really, really scary.

The apps were all carriers of the Tizi backdoor — a piece of malware, which has been around since 2015. Through exploits in the Android operating system, Tizi was able to gain root access to the device and snoop about the user's pictures, phone ...