Over 2,000 dangerous apps on Google Play Store !
A study carried away for 2 years ,has found that 2,040 apps on Google Play Store are harmful in some way. The study done by some researches of the University of Sydney and Data61 of CSIRO says the research applied on about 1 million apps
Study finds over 2,000 dangerous apps on Google Play Store.
The most common issue being that these apps require suspicious amount of permissions. But, some of the apps have been straight up called as malware(malware is a kind of software designed to cause damage to computer,server or network in the form of execuatable code,scripts or software ). The report highlights Google’s failure to guard Play Store from fraudulent developers.
The study finds that there are a large amount of fake apps on Play Store that are not malware. It adds that these apps require unnecessary permissions to access data that they don’t need in the first place. Some of the popular titles asking for such permissions include Temple Run and Hill Climb Racing.
How researchers identified harmful apps on Google Play Store?
The researchers used an algorithm ,that coded to look for similar text description. The algorithms also looked for visually similar icons to identify fake apps on the Play Store. They set visually similar icons to 10,000 most popular apps on Google‘s app store. The algorithm reportedly returned 49,608 potential threats based on the algorithm.
Google removed 28 fake apps from Play Store after a report by Quick Heal.
About 7,246 of the apps found on Play Store were flagged as malicious by VirusTotal. The app flagged 2,040 of them as fake and high-risk apps. In total, 1,565 apps were found requesting at least five sensitive permissions. On the other, there are 1,407 apps that embed third-party ad libraries,otherwise called adware, that injects ads into apps in unauthorized manner .
Google says the apps studied by the researchers have already been removed. Increasingly, Google is taking action against such fraudulent apps based on research and studies around the world.
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