We’ve always reported on misses."Īndroid researchers agree, too, that the conventional wisdom about downloading apps from the Play Store still very much holds true. "We’re very data-oriented, but we're more concerned about making sure we’re doing the right thing than gaming the numbers. "We’ve been struggling to figure out how do you get that last one percent, and we encourage the security community to reach out to us," Ludwig says. Malicious applications still best the Play Store’s defenses and threaten Android users. But those factors also make the Play Store a diverse morass for Google to police. Openness is Android's hallmark, and the platform's huge scale is one of its core strengths. While Google has fortified Play’s scanning defenses for years-they now fall under the umbrella of Google's Play Protect security suite-malicious apps frequently slip in, and some attract millions of downloads before Google can find and remove them. The applications, which had names like "Earn Real Money Gift Cards" and "Bubble Shooter Wild Life," had malware directly in them and were also built to quietly download additional nefarious apps once installed. Meanwhile, researchers at the security firm ESET announced in early September that they had found malicious apps from the BankBot malware family in Google Play. Even after Google removed the offenders, Check Point discovered a new sample of the malware in Google Play (which got removed as well) that had quickly racked up more than 5,000 unique downloads. They had cumulatively been downloaded between 1 million and 4.2 million times. Take just last week, when the security firm Check Point discovered a new strain of Android malware called “ExpensiveWall” lurking in about 50 apps in the Play Store. So why, then, has so much malware slipped through lately? Unlike third-party app stores that are generally difficult to vet and validate, Google Play has built-in mechanisms to screen every app for malware, ransomware, and assorted sketchiness. The standard advice for Android users to avoid downloading malicious apps is simple: Only get apps from the official Google Play Store.
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