Google suspends 85 adware infected fraudulent applications

Google just eliminated a whopping 85 fake applications that had crept into its Play Store following a report from Trend Micro, the research and analyst company, that there was usual adware behavior in them. Evidently, the malicious applications were supposedly television/remote control applications or game applications all of which had gone through 9m download attempts.

To be precise, the 85 fresh applications consisted of a few popular games and utilities, among others, which were actually adware. When used, the apps served several advertisements usually performing nasty things such as showing the screen totally hidden or as full display. A few ads were even active behind visibility as they extorted advertising money from innocent end-users.

When the apps were downloaded and run, one pop-up ad emerged full screen. That ad would instruct the end-user for clicking a button again and again for the ad activity to continue. But whenever clicked one fresh ad page would appear on-screen to the extent of crashing down of the app. A few of the applications even traced the unlocking procedures of the screen. This led to display ads on the end-user's screen whenever the latter was locked.

At the time of Trend Micro's tests the company discovered that the applications' call-to-action keys were the same, while pressing every one of the keys inside the application gave out an ad. The applications contaminated with adware subsequently notified the end-user when it buffered else loaded, and following some seconds, they faded out from the device's screen, with its icon hidden on the phone. But although hidden, the fake applications remained active invisibly and repeatedly gave out full-screen advertisements at intervals of 15/30 minutes. A few advertisements even displayed full-screen ads whenever the end-user unlocked his device. Gadgets.ndtv.com posted this, January 9, 2019.

And when informed about the above adware behavior in the applications, Google quickly suspended the activity of each of them. A particular application named Easy Universal TV Remote was found to get downloaded nearly 5m times, while complaints emerged enough to fill the section of listing's comments.

In 2018, Google, while de-listing fake bounty queries, cleared Play Store off 22 applications.

» SPAMfighter News - 1/14/2019