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1.2% of Apps On Google Play Are Repackaged To Deliver Ads, Collect Info

Posted by timothy on from the seems-like-an-undercount-to-me dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Not a month goes by without security researchers finding new malicious apps on Google Play. According to BitDefender, more than one percent of 420,000+ analyzed apps offered on Google's official Android store are repackaged versions of legitimate apps. In the long run, their existence hurts the users, the legitimate developers, and Google's reputation in general. Google Play has recently surpassed the one million mark when it comes to the apps it offers, and the researchers have analyzed a good chunk of the total in order to discover just how many are hiding their true nature."

5 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. F-Droid, FTW by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    F-Droid is the open source store. Pleanty of good apps there that do just about anything you'd need an app to do, for free as in beer and free as in speach.

    https://f-droid.org/

  2. What is being added by Fnord666 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Here is a decent graphic showing just what is being added to these repackaged applications.

    --
    'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
  3. Link to the original article by Fnord666 · · Score: 3, Informative

    here is the original article in case anyone is interested. It goes into greater detail about the issues involved.

    --
    'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
  4. Re:How many downloads? by mrchaotica · · Score: 3, Informative

    Droidwall needs a facelift, but it is a decent front end for iptables.

    According to FDroid, Droidwall got abandoned, forked and renamed to AFWall+.

    --

    "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

  5. Re:Irrelevant by immaterial · · Score: 3, Informative

    iOS can be argued to be less secure than Android because the entire OS depends on the jail mechanism.

    What does this sentence mean? From context it looks like you're saying the only form of security on iOS is Apple's App Store approval system, but that's obviously false. Every app is sandboxed (no access to the system or other apps) and must request specific permission for privileged data (location/contacts/photos/calendars/etc.).