A shocking revelation has been made. According to Trend Micro's latest findings 293,091 apps were found to be malicious and out of these, 68,740 were found on the official Google Play store. Around 22% of these malicious apps were found to leak information about the user.
Trend Micro has also predicted that malicious and high-risk Android apps will hit 1 million sometime this year.
It is seen that shady developers are now taking advantage of Candy Crush, one of the hottest gaming apps in both social networks and Android. Candy Crush’s popularity made it the perfect target for dubious developers and cybercriminals who want to lure and profit from fans of the game.
"It is common for suspicious developers and parties to use the name of popular apps as social engineering bait. As soon as new versions make headlines, expect that these guys are out there concocting their bogus versions," said Sharda Tickoo, Product Marketing Manager, Trend Micro India.
The report further revealed information that 22% of apps were found to inappropriately leak user data, over the network, SMS or telephone. The leaked data most often includes IMEI, ICCID, contact data and telephone number. A few apps were even found to leak data using the microphone and camera (along with several other kinds of private data). In addition, 32% of apps were classified as “Poor” in terms of battery usage, 24% “Poor” for network usage and 28% for memory usage.
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