Before downloading an app from the Google Play Store, we generally check the interface and the comments related to the app but, according to a new study, over 2,000 apps on Play Store are dangerous and not safe for downloading as they are malware-laden.
According to reports, over 1 million apps were tested and investigated on the Google Play Store by a group of researchers from the University of Sydney and CSIRO’s Data61 and they found over 2,000 apps that were specifically designed to cause disruption and damage to your computer software.
And, the sad part about this is that some of the apps that were found to be dangerous are extremely popular apps with millions of downloads.
This definitely raises a few alarms because all of us have some or the other app on our mobile phones that we use on a daily basis.
The study also reveals that extremely popular gaming apps like Temple Run, Free Flow and Hill Climb Racing have been forged and imitated.
How did the researchers figure this out? Well, the apps were investigated through neutral networks that allowed the researchers to identify apps with similar icons and partially copied text descriptions of the top 10,000 most popular apps in the Play Store. And, with the help of the ‘multi-modal embedding‘ machine learning process researchers found 49,608 potential counterfeits.
Google says, in 2018, it stopped more malicious apps than ever before from entering the store . As per Google, the number of rejected apps have increased by 55% last year. The app suspension rate also increased by over 68% last year.
So, even if the apps are on credible stores like Google, they can’t be completely trusted.
