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MOBILE ATT&CK

Suppress Application Icon

T1628.001 · defense-evasion

A malicious application could suppress its icon from being displayed to the user in the application launcher. This hides the fact that it is installed, and can make it more difficult for the user to uninstall the application. Hiding the application's icon programmatically does not require any special permissions.

This behavior has been seen in the BankBot/Spy Banker family of malware. Beginning in Android 10, changes were introduced to inhibit malicious applications’ ability to hide their icon. If an app is a system app, requests no permissions, or does not have a launcher activity, the application’s icon will be fully hidden.

Further, if the device is fully managed or the application is in a work profile, the icon will be fully hidden. Otherwise, a synthesized activity is shown, which is a launcher icon that represents the app’s details page in the system settings. If the user clicks the synthesized activity in the launcher, they are taken to the application’s details page in the system settings.

Android
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Actors Using This

4
italyCy4Gate
italyeSurv
spainMollitiam Industries
italyNegg Group
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Likely Attack Path

Techniques the same actors pair with this one distinctively - those showing up among actors who use this technique noticeably more than across all actors (lift > 1.15), grouped by kill-chain phase. The × is that lift multiplier; the shared-actor count is in the tooltip. A near-universal technique pairs with everything at baseline, so its list is short by design.
initial-access earlier
T1458 · Replication Through Removable Media ×59.50
defense-evasion same
T1406 · Obfuscated Files or Information ×59.50
discovery later
T1418 · Software Discovery ×59.50
collection later
T1414 · Clipboard Data ×59.50T1512 · Video Capture ×59.50T1513 · Screen Capture ×59.50T1517 · Access Notifications ×59.50T1636.001 · Calendar Entries ×47.60T1636.002 · Call Log ×47.60T1636.003 · Contact List ×47.60T1636.004 · SMS Messages ×47.60T1409 · Stored Application Data ×21.64T1430.001 · Remote Device Management Services ×21.64T1429 · Audio Capture ×18.31T1430 · Location Tracking ×11.90
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Detection Coverage

0/6 layers
Coverage across standard detection surfaces. Rows marked none have no rule of that type mapped. Some are real blind spots worth closing; others are simply not applicable to this technique (e.g. YARA matches malware files, not network behaviour).
Behavioral / log (Sigma) none
Analytics (MITRE CAR) none
Runtime / container (Falco) none
File / malware (YARA) none
Network (Suricata/Snort) none
Vuln scan (Nuclei) none
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