T1628.001Not expressible in SigmaMOBILE

Suppress Application Icon

Defense EvasionAndroid

Where this stands

No Sigma rule can address this — the telemetry MITRE names has no Sigma logsource behind it.

Sigma has no logsource taxonomy for mobile platforms. MITRE's telemetry here is mobile EDR and device APIs, which no Sigma rule can address.

What the technique is

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.

Read it on attack.mitre.org

What MITRE says you would watch

AN1842
Correlates (1) suppression or disablement of launcher-visible application components or effective reduction of user-facing launcher presence, (2) persistence of installed application state after icon suppression, and (3) continued runtime activity such as background execution, framework use, sensor access, or network communication after the icon becomes unavailable or is replaced by reduced-discoverability launcher behavior. The defender observes a causal chain where an app removes or reduces its launcher visibility while remaining operational and continuing meaningful activity.