Tech and Telecom

Most Anti-Malware Apps on Play Store Don’t Work

If you type ‘antivirus’ in the Google Play Store search tab, you will see more than 200 applications claiming to be antivirus apps, but how do you know they all work? AV-comparatives did the difficult task for us and tested 250 apps from 2018, claiming to be antivirus applications.

To our surprise 170 of them did not pass the test, that makes two-thirds of the samples. These applications don’t do anything to detect malicious behavior. They merely use blacklists and whitelists to filter out unwanted applications. This is not effective, and most of the applications are only an advertising platform with a fake interface.

The applications that passed the AV-comparatives test were all from the companies that have a strong background in internet security. The rest were found to be a bluff. These applications were compiled by inexperienced programmers and amateurs.

It was also seen that more than 30 fake antivirus applications vanished from the play store over the past few months. Thus, installing antivirus applications from vendors that have a reputation is more feasible.

Now coming to what Google Play Store does in preventing the malware from infecting Android devices, There is a review process, that only checks if the application is harmful, but this process only works for the malware that is already known.

When it comes to quality assurance for malware apps, Google Play Store has no standards in place.

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Published by
Mahnoor Nadeem