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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.
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.
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!
They are. Windows Bridge for iOS/Android - allows one to port applications to Windows Phone using Visual Studio.
OK, but what's the killer application that Android or iOS users that Windows Mobile has to get them to put the emulator/run-time on their devices in the first place? What makes anyone think that Apple would allow such an application to exist in its app store?
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
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
The problem is every time we've seen this happen, it's always backfired on whoever is trying it.
For example, when OS/2 added Win32 support, nobody wrote anything for OS/2 anymore. Why? Because it was easier to just write the Win32 program and just ignore OS/2.
Three years ago Google did the smart thing and pulled the reverse against Apple: They wrote an application framework that made it easy to port Android apps to iOS.
Besides, their "bridges" don't solve the number one problem with porting apps: Ongoing support costs. Initially porting the app is perhaps the least expensive part, so at best it solves "a" problem, but not "the" problem.
Why do you think major banking companies like Chase and Wells-Fargo pulled their WP apps even after they already had a working app? Because they no longer wanted to provide support services to a platform that didn't have enough users to justify spending any further money on.
Another problem you run into is that e.g. Android apps are going to be built with the Material Design Language, which uses lighter colors and depth perspective, and therefore doesn't at all mesh with the "Modern Design Language" which uses flat (i.e. zero depth) fisher-price colors and big ugly white on black text.