Windows Phone Store Increasingly Targeted With Fake Mobile Apps

An anonymous reader writes: A post by security company Avast says not only are a large amount of fake apps available from the third-party marketplace of the Windows Phone Store, but they also remain available for quite a while despite negative comments and other flags from end-users. Avast speculates that improved security and auditing procedures at rival stores such as Google Play account for the increasing attention that fake app-publishers are giving to the Windows phone app market.

Comments

We have to redefine "malicious"

[DNS-and-BIND]

From the post on Avast's blog, the ones who started this whole thing, the scam is evidently to put out software with the same name as 50 different major companies, wait for people to mistakenly download, and pay $1.99 for the app. That's not much of a major criminal scheme, it's pretty pathetic and it is well within the powers of a major corporation like Microsoft to shut this down.

The really eye-opening part is when one of the "malicious" apps is defined as the following:

"Claiming to âoeprotect your phone from malware and theftâ, this malicious app runs in the background of victimsâ(TM) devices once downloaded and collects their data and location."

This is what Windows 10 does by design. I think we need to redefine what "malicious" means. In both softwares you clicked "I agree" to the T&C before continuing.

Re:If I was Microsoft, here's what I'd do.

[ChunderDownunder]

if they made an iOS and Android emulator so you could run both iOS and Android apps on the Windows phones

They are. Windows Bridge for iOS/Android - allows one to port applications to Windows Phone using Visual Studio.