Google Play Store contains over 2000 harmful apps
University of Sydney and Data61 of CSIRO have conducted a two-year-long study that found 2,040 apps on Google Play Store that are harmful in some way. Some require too many permissions, while others are just plain malware.
The research covered around 1 million apps on Google Play Store and found a large number of fake apps without malware but still requiring permissions to access data they shouldn’t. Some of them are very famous – Hill Climb Racing or Temple Run.
The researchers used neural networks and machine learning in order to process all the data. The algorithm was looking for similar text description and visually similar icons to the 10,000 most popular apps on the app store. The algorithm returned 49,608 potential threats.
After that, around 7,246 apps were flagged as malicious and 2,040 of them were fake and high-risk apps. Additionally, 1,565 of them request at least five sensitive permissions and 1,407 embed third-party ad libraries.
The apps that have been studied have already been removed and Google’s team reports that the number of rejected app submissions had increased more than 55% over the last year and app suspension has risen to 66%.