Extending a word of caution to smartphone users, researchers from the University of Sydney and CSIRO’s Data61 have said that after thorough investigation and study, they have discovered that there over 2000 malware-laden counterfeit apps on Google Play Store. Some of these apps are popular and downloaded over a million times. The two-year long study also reveals a growing number of fake gaming apps and apps that contain risky malware, on Google Playstore.
The study noted that Google Play Store also includes several fake apps that despite claiming to be being malware free requests “dangerous data access permissions” and said that “Games Temple Run, Free Flow and Hill Climb Racing were among the most commonly counterfeited.”
Researchers made use of neural networks to identify apps with similar icons and partially plagiarised text descriptions of the top 10,000 most popular apps in the Play Store. In addition, ‘multi-modal embedding’ machine learning process helped researchers identify 49,608 potential counterfeits as well.
Google says the company now removes malicious developers from Play store much faster when compared to previous years. The company also claims that in 2018 it stopped more malicious apps from entering the store than ever before. Google also says that the number of rejected apps submission in Play store increased by more than 55 per cent last year and that the app suspension rate increased by over 66 per cent.