A few weeks ago, we reported over 230 Android apps that could be harmful to your phone and seems like those issues aren’t going anywhere anytime soon as the Google Play store security concerns worsen with a recent study showing over 2,040 copycat apps that could be dangerous to your phone as well.
The study was conducted by the University of Sydney and CSIRO’s Data61 over two years and came to a conclusion that many fraudulent copies of popular apps and games like Temple Run and Free Flow are harmful and ask for too many sensitive permissions without justification.
In order to process a million apps, the researchers are said to have used neural networks and machine learning “to look for similar text description and visually similar icons to the 10,000 most popular apps on the app store.” This method returned over 49,608 potential threats.
Of these 1 million apps scanned, 7 246 were flagged as malicious and 2040 were branded as fake high-risk applications.
Most of the apps identified as dangerous in the publication have now been removed so far, around 35% from the Google play store but there are concerns about the remaining 65% since they can still be downloaded.
While Google Play’s success is marked on its flexibility and customisable features that allow almost anyone to build an app, there have been a number of problematic apps that have slipped through the cracks and have bypassed automated vetting processes.
“Our society is increasingly reliant on smartphone technology so it’s important that we build solutions to quickly detect and contain malicious apps before affecting a wider population of smartphone users.” Study co-author Dr Suranga Seneviratne from the University of Sydney.
Some of the apps identified by the study also took advantage of excessive user permissions, with 1,565 asking for potentially dangerous permissions. In addition 1,407 had at least five embedded third-party ad libraries.
Does stuff like this always make you prefer the choose a device Apple’s iOS to Android? Let us know in the comment section.
