How likely are you to get a malware on your Android phone?
As of 2015, the number of reported vulnerabilities for Android has been increasing - e.g. In 2017, Google removed 70% more dangerous apps than in previous year.
Are you able to identify the malicious App? And how big is a risk of getting infected by malware? Find out and learn something new.
Google says that 0.09% of Android-powered devices that installed apps only from the official app repository in 2017 were compromised with at least one Potentially Harmful Application (PHA), which is Google’s term for mobile malware.
This share dropped further, to 0.08%, in the first three quarters of 2018. With Android’s 2-billion user base, this still amounts to 1.6 million devices.
Source: www.welivesecurity.com
For all intents and purposes, the newer your Android version is the likelier you are to avoid being compromised by malware. This has been the case especially since Android Lollipop (5.x) was launched back in November 2014, with the PHA (Potentialy Harmful App) rate falling consistently from 0.66% for that version to 0.06% for Pie (9.x), released in August 2018.
Source: www.welivesecurity.com
The share of devices running one of Android’s latest two versions – Oreo (8.x) and Pie – remains low, as shown by Google’s own data as of October 26, 2018. In fact, on distribution of less than 0.1%, Pie has yet to get a piece of that pie (chart).
Meanwhile, nearly one in every three Android-powered devices run either Lollipop or one of the platform’s even older versions.
Source: www.welivesecurity.com
The trick takes advantage of the fact that apart from the app icon and name, there is one more element the user sees when browsing apps – the developer name, displayed just below the app name. And since unknown developer names are no use for popularity-boosting purposes anyway, some app authors have been setting fictitious, high numbers of installs as their developer names, in an effort to look like established developers with vast userbases.
See more examples: www.welivesecurity.com
Furthermore, Google says it is getting better at proactively protecting Android users from the growing menace of mobile malware:
“Not only did we remove more bad apps, we were able to identify and action against them earlier. In fact, 99% of apps with abusive contents were identified and rejected before anyone could install them. This was possible through significant improvements in our ability to detect abuse – such as impersonation, inappropriate content, or malware – through new machine learning models and techniques.”
Source: www.welivesecurity.com
Google says that it removed more than 250,000 impersonating apps during 2017.
Impersonating apps can’t necessarily be considered as unpleasant as malware, but they are clearly an attempt to generate money by duping users into downloading and installing bogus versions of an app – thereby potentially stealing revenue from the genuine developer, and damaging reputations.Source: www.welivesecurity.com
For more information, go to the Android documentation for developers:
https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/permission-element.html
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