Google Play Store has been plagued with malicious apps that have placed the store in the spotlight a lot recently.
The latest findings that have been published a couple of days ago by Trend Micro are offering enough evidence that the Play Store is filled with software which aims to leverage unwitting users’ devices for hidden purposes.
This issue of malicious apps is nowhere near new, but there’s definitely an urgency to solve it. Why? Because web users are connecting more and more to the web and the scammers’ techniques are evolving with each day.
Malware downloaded over 9.3 million times
CyberScoop reported that researchers from Trend Micro had found 182 gaming and camera-related apps which have been all downloaded more than 9.3 million times.
The horrible thing is that these came loaded with malicious software that has been exploiting victims’ phones in order to boost advertising revenue.
This discovery comes not too long after Symantec and Wandera have revealed some Android apps that were meant to do a similar thing: trick users into downloading the software and then flood them with ads.
All apps discovered by Trend Micro served deceptive ads, ran in the background, took over the whole screen, ran duplicate ads, and more even if the users tried to escape them.
“Based on the apps’ behaviors, we generated heuristic patterns that we used to analyze other samples that we have detected,” researchers said in a blog post.
The continued and explained that “After analysis of the apps’ package names, labels, publishing times, offline times, code structures, and code styles and features, we deduced that the adware campaign has been active since 2018 and that the apps are from the same adware campaign despite their having been submitted by different developers.”
This is not the first time when Google Play Store has this issue and we bet it won’t be the last either.
After finishing Theatrical Journalism at the Faculty of Theatre and Television in Cluj-Napoca, Rada reviewed movies, books, theatre pieces and she also wrote articles from the IT niche as a content editor for software producers. At the moment, she is working with various online advertising firms.
