More than 50% of popular Christmas and New Year’s Apps contain adware in the Google App store
source: http://www.visualthreat.com/our_blog.action Security researchers have discovered that over 50% of popular Christmas or New Year’s apps are Adware, while only 14% were safe and ad-free. After collecting hundreds of popular apps from Christmas and New Year categories in the Google App store in early December, VisualThreat found adware percentage peaked at an all-time high of 51% due to Christmas mobile advertising. Admob is the most popular mobile advertisement platform. The reason for the high peak of adware matches the mobile marketing pattern of the Christmas and New Year holiday season. There are six risk behavior types (data leakage, SMS activities, file operations, spying, networking activities and code execution) that are defined to discover hidden threats. Based on that, a comprehensive threat report was generated for each adware app by applying deep-analytic threat correlations. 7.54% has medium to high risk-level, and 11.53% has more than three unclaimed permissions. The top data-leakage contents are GPS location, contact information, network provider info, message queries, etc. For unclaimed permissions, 3 apps even claimed more than 15 unnecessary permissions! VisualThreat has informed Google about this concern, and is waiting for their response. Here is the approach of how to check whether your app is adware or not: submit your app to www.visualthreat.com, waiting for about 15 seconds and you will know the answer. Enjoy your safe and ad-free holiday! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Security Discussions" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-security-discuss. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
