Slashdot Mirror
More Malware-Infected Apps Found In Android Market
Trailrunner7 writes "For the third time in the last few months, Google has had to remove a slew of malware-infected apps from the Android Market and suspend some publishers. Ten Android apps in the Official Android Market are known to be infected, but many more could be victims of the Plankton Trojan. Researcher Xuxian Jiang claims that early variants of the Trojan have evaded detection for as long as two months."
you post a list of the infected applications in the freakin summary, so when TFA gets slashdotted, we know what the hell they were?
I'm just saying...
Sooner or later Google will need to do some sort of Quality Control on their store, or they'll just keep making the Marketplace look even less trustworthy and push people to the Amazon store.
...but there's something to be said for iOS being a "closed" platform with a (mostly) strict approval process. There's a lot of controversy about apps getting blocked from the iTunes App Store, but so far there haven't been any significant outbreaks of malware/trojans like the Android platform has had. Caveat: I actively develop for both platforms, so I have no "stake" in either side. Just making a point about the open vs. closed issue in related to PII leakage risks. Let the flaming begin!
Why do you not link to the original article?!
turns up Sophos' analysis of this "Plankton" malware.
The sample of the EULA associated with the malware app (yes, malware EULAs) lists "Angry Bird Cheater" by name, so there's one of the candidates. Also, quoting the article:
So, "Choopcheec" seems to be a common codeword for the apps. Whatever that is.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Good point. I usually prefer Panaphonic products, especially since I'm boycotting Sorny and generally unhappy with the product quality from Magnetbox.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Your comment is indicative of the kind of arrogance that makes people hate so many technically proficient people. Do you even realize how arrogant you are to call people "morons" because they don't happen to have the kind of technical understanding and knowledge that we have? I'm sorry, but it's YOUR ARROGANCE that marks you as the real moron. People have different skills and knowledge. Yours (and mine) happens to be in a technical field, among others, presumably. But you have areas where you don't know anything, too. Everybody does. Just because people don't value YOUR subject area above all others doesn't mean they're morons who are "dumb users." Just as a person who doesn't want to be an auto mechanic isn't a moron when he simply wants his car to work without him futzing with it. You really need to climb down from the high horse and realize that people aren't necessarily morons just because they don't know everything about IT that we know.
I can take a shit in a box, and mark it guaranteed, but then all you'll have is a guaranteed box of shit.
You (and your friends) can't be allowed to stamp your box.
Google would be the obvious choice, though, since they have the biggest investment to lose if this all goes to hell.
1. There are alternatives, you can buy an Android phone.
2. If IOS devices made it easy to use another store, then non-technical users would be at more risk. They would get an email that said, "Hey try out this fun app" which would take them to the non-curated store, they would blindly click-through all warnings from the OS and voila, you've got a mobile experience every bit as toxic and unusable as the Windows PC experience--and you've just destroyed Apple's value proposition and their $100B market cap.
What it really boils down to is that most of Apple's critics (a) don't care at all about non-technical users and (b) really want Apple to fail anyway so are happy to argue for Apple to adopt flexibility that would lead to financial disaster for them. Apple fundamentally disagrees on both points so you aren't going to sway them.
But you have other options, see #1.