Knock knock. Who’s there? More scam apps on Canonical’s Snap Store!

No this isn’t a joke, sadly. Canonical once again have an issue with scam apps appearing on the Snap Store, which is becoming a repeating problem. I wrote about this before in February, and again previously in October 2023 and here we go again.

After the last issue, Canonical seemed to be slowly moving on the subject, with discussions being opened on their Discourse forum to chat about implementing more checks. So they uh, might want to speed up actually checking on app publishers.

Alan Pope has a great blog post about the issue, talking about how another ten scam crypto wallet apps appeared from “digisafe00000”. They were all removed, but uh, guess what? They’re back again under a different publisher name this time it’s “codeshield0x0000”.

A weirdly named publisher putting up 10 crypto wallet apps? You know, if there was proper human review here, someone might have actually thought “hey this is a bit odd, maybe I should do a little digging first?”.

Since they’re on the Snap Store, they will also show up in the Ubuntu Software app, which is quite a problem.

Pope dives into one of the apps in the blog post, noting the create an account function (obviously) doesn’t work, since they just want you to “log in” with your current wallet details so they can poach it. As Pope says “It’s trivially easy to publish scammy applications like this in the Canonical Snap Store, and for them to go unnoticed.” and it seems it really is. So right now if you want to scam users on Ubuntu — just publish a Snap of something!

Really not a good look for Canonical and Ubuntu. They need to get moving on this repeating problem.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.