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by John W. Simek, Vice President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.

Hundreds of Unsafe Anti-Virus Apps in Google Play

March 19, 2019

Just because an app is in Google Play, Microsoft store or Apple’s app store doesn’t mean it is safe or even works as the manufacturer claims. A recent study by AV-Comparatives tested 250 Android anti-virus apps available in the Google Play store. Only 80 of the apps detected over 30% of the malicious apps and had zero false positives. Pretty scary. Further details of the testing showed that 138 apps detected less than 30% of the malware samples or had a high rate of false positives. In the past two months, 32 of the apps have been removed from the Google Play store. Thankfully, the A/V product I use is one of the 80 top tested apps. Check out the study to see where your app lands.

Noted security blogger, Graham Cluley, has some great advice for vetting apps and his impressions of the study.

  • Remember that just because an app is in the Google Play store it doesn’t mean it’s any good. Google isn’t testing the anti-virus capabilities of a product before listing it.
  • Yes, use an anti-virus from a brand you trust. But don’t forget that on occasion fraudsters have stolen the branding of genuine security products to try to trick Android users into downloading it from the Google Play store.
  • Read reviews, but don’t put your trust in them. Scammers may have written reviews to dupe the unwary. On occasion, bogus anti-virus apps have even been pushed to the top of the Google Play store charts by scammers.
  • To be sure you’re downloading the product you think you’re downloading, use a link from the vendor’s own website (here is the product page for Bitdefender Mobile Security, for instance)

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