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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.
All the good apps are on iOS and Android.
They should be suspicious of any well-known app being in their store.
They probably meant to say that they're not true apps. No true app could be a knock-off, malicious, useless, etc. </rofl>
Fake as in "imitation". Which is precisely what a "knock-off" is.
They get hired at all the major companies including non-IT/software companies. They are there to ensure the websites, applications, IT infrastructure etc. are secure. Apart from that many also do consulting on their own for quite a good sum of money. Recently a telco customer of ours hired the services of a security consultant for $570 per hr for over a few months to oversee the roll out of LTE.
Maybe they found it easier to personally email both Windows Phone users to warn them of the risks.
I'm not sure if this is legal or not, but if they made an iOS and Android emulator so you could run both iOS and Android apps on the Windows phones, some people might get a Windows Phone then who'd otherwise be getting one or the other because they figure they get all types of compatibility.
.exes do.
.exes with wild abandon like it should. Part of the reason Windows lost share to Apple in the late 90s is because Windows was targetted by viruses more. If you're doing sandboxed apps as the future of Windows, suddenly it is very very hard to get a virus all of a sudden. Windows users would rejoice with having Windows Apps they could run on their PC without worrying about being hosed. Windows could even allow an app data backup cloud, so in the case you do get a virus in the old ways, when you reinstall your PC, all the apps can reinstall with your saved data. Just being able to explore downloading lots of free app software without worrying it making your computer die would be awesome. It is what we should have had with Windows 98 if Microsoft took the hard road and completely redesigned their operating system that an .exe couldn't make changes outside its install directory and other virus resistant moves. Instead of downloading every piece of cool looking software on the Internet, the slight chance it could be a virus means we just roll with the software we need to use.
Then I'd make backwards compatibility to Windows Vista where all windows versions could run: Windows Phone apps, iOS apps, and Android apps. It is very very important to do this similar to a sandbox where the apps can't escalate privileges and whammy system files like the old Windows
Then suddenly you not only fixed the windows phone, but the #1 problem with the Windows operating system in the Internet age. The windows operating system is just not designed to download random
I think a lot of Windows users would love to be able to use Android and iOS apps also. Throw in the weird functionality of a Surface pro they're trying to market of being a touch screen PC, and running Windows/iOS/Android apps on them only make sense.
God spoke to me
No need to panic, I've talked to the Windows Phone user and he says he doesn't use their app store, so it's all good.
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:
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.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Because there is little difference between "Software Engineer" and "Security Researcher" - it is really just a term for the clueless article writers to attempt to grasp at what we do. More often than not, security issues are found on accident by regular developers just doing their normal day-to-day jobs, and stumble upon something. Then in their spare time, they dump their findings on their blog, and them BAM, they're all of a sudden a "Security Researcher"!!!
Crap, better take down Mind Croft by Macrosoft before I get caught!
The thing you talk about - Android and iOS apps on Windows phones - already exists (in preview form, at least). Originally called "Project Astoria", Microsoft seems to have decided to call it Windows Bridges, and is only for Windows 10 Mobile (not out yet, but the previews have been publicly available for months). Android and iOS apps can be recompiled for Windows with minimal effort. There's also a feature of Project Astoria that lets you run Android APKs directly, unmodified, on W10M... but that one seems to be in limbo, and may or may not see official release (the Android permissions system is different enough from the Windows Phone one that it apparently causes some problems).
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
The article is interesting but fails to ask the most important question: what is Microsoft doing about this? It feels like they're not doing anything. Just another sign of the impending death of Windows Phone.
Nah, that is insanely great.
If I didn't have my heart set on the retro thinkpad project, I'd most probably go for a surface, probably the surface book.
Are you just being incredibly obtuse? A "fake" app is one that is trying to pass itself off as another app but is not that app
Businesses will buy expensive phones if they do the things they need and support integration and management with the systems they already use. You really need third party tools to manage iOS and Android's all rely on Google Apps and have weird holes in their capabilities (e.g. device backup is a PITA). If the argument is for getting phones for middle managers who aren't important enough to demand an iphone and exemption from IT policies, having policy-based management that's already built into your enterprise directory system is probably a decent argument. I'm thinking this is more of a push to eat what's left of RIM's market.
Microsoft's Surface devices may to a certain extent be a "showing of the flag" rather than a highly competitive design. I support Surfaces in my organization and I think they're pretty great, but I say that with the understanding that they're as much a nudge to wider portable PC hardware manufacturers and to engage Apple in a certain amount of one-upmanship as they are compelling devices. It's a radical sort of product that can be made to serve in a wide variety of situations and putting them out in the world may be providing the impetus for improvements in other portable hardware.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Are you just being incredibly obtuse? A "fake" app is one that is trying to pass itself off as another app but is not that app
Stop being an apologist. They shouldn't be referred to as "fake apps".
Back in the day, virus emails would include a "fake image attachment". It was fake because it wasn't an image, but was an exe. It was meant to get people to click it, or to get the email client to automatically run it. Things like, "flower.jpg.exe". Or using the unicode left to right override, such as "Great Song by [U+202e]3pm.SCR", which would be displayed as "Great Song by RCS.mp3", but executed as a screen saver.
Impostor, Scam, Phishing, Fraudulent... there's plenty of applicable names, but it's not a "fake app" unless it's not an app**.
** at the very very least, it shouldn't do anything like what its name suggests. For example, back in December 2014, there were 3 entries in the Apple App Store for "Quickoffice ...". Two of them actually included a word processor and spreadsheet - those were not fake apps. One of them was just a grey screen with a button reading "TAP" that closed the window. Maybe the latter could be considered a fake app.
We'll set up our own app store. It takes care of itself. Nearly no staff required. It's all profit!
Stop being an apologist. They shouldn't be referred to as "fake apps".
Because you're being autistic? Anyone who isn't being intentionally dense understands what the phrase meant.