Google Play Store might have a ton of apps to entertain users on Android, but many of those apps may secretly be very dangerous for users.
According to a finding by ESET Malware Researcher Lukas Stefanko, Google Play Store hosted 205 harmful apps in the month of July, 2019. What's worse is that these apps were downloaded over 32 million times in the month of July itself.
Reuters
A majority of these apps were related to hidden-ads that accounted to 19.2 million installs, according to the report. Other malicious applications for the previous month include scams related to subscription, stalkerware, fake apps, fake anti-virus apps, adware as well as applications with embedded backdoors.
What's astonishing is that while the subscription apps causing trouble were just three, they actually had around 12 million installs in total -- a third of all the downloads on the list.?
Lukas Stefanko also said the hidden-ad apps have an aggressive approach to actually showing adds to users where it takes up the whole screen, with no other functionality.
Twitter: @LukasStefanko
Lukas was able to find these apps based on research, reports as well as tweets published by the infosec community during July 2019.?
This isn't the first instance revealing the lack of security and privacy on Google Play Store. Recently, Google removed 7 stalkerware apps which were revealed by anti-virus company Avast. The apps were able to track the victim's location, get access to their contacts as well as text messages and call history. Pitched as kids and employee monitoring tools.
Another report proving Google's negligence on the Play Store revealed by Symantec stated that there were over 150 Fake Jio apps on the Play Store that promise users to get free data, but just end up displaying ads instead.