More than 700,000 malicious Android applications have been deleted in 2017


byStephen Frank

If you decide to use your smartphone conveniently,Car navigation applicationYou can guide the route to your destination,Apply boarding train from Shinkansen applicationTo go,Play against people all over the world in the gameDo it yourselfTask managementYou need to install and use an application that suits your needs, such as using an application on it. But at the official app storeDistributed application with malwareBecause there are cases that it was being done, it is a place where hesitates to reach out to an application made abroad that is not familiar because it is convenient. Google does not worry about it and has been doing efforts to eradicate applications including unreliable applications and malware for many years so that they can install Gangan Application from Google Play, an application store for Android .

Android Developers Blog: How we fought bad apps and malicious developers in 2017
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2018/01/how-we-fought-bad-apps-and-malicious.html

"2017 makes Google Play a more difficult place for those who want to halve the opportunity for users to install malicious apps, protect users and devices from harm, and exploit the app ecosystem for their own benefit I succeeded in doing it. In fact, in 2017, Google said it succeeded in removing malicious apps that violate more than 700,000 Google Play policies from the store. This is an amazing number of 70% increase over the previous year, and in 2017 it can be said that "years when it was difficult to misuse Google Play."

Also, Google not only deleted malicious apps from the store, but also reveals that they are trying to recognize them and make efforts to exclude them more quickly. Indeed, 99% of applications containing unauthorized content has been identified / deleted before installation by users. It seems that improvement of discrimination ability of this unauthorized application was realized by introducing new technology such as machine learning.

How does Google actually delete malicious apps? "Disguised as a famous application" is used as a common way to easily spread malicious applications easily. In fact, in 2014 survey results were announced that 80% of Google Play's popular applications are fake applications.

80% of popular apps on Google Play found fake apps - GIGAZINE


Since famous applications are often searched by application name, it is relatively easy to install fake applications to those who are trying to install famous applications by making the application names and icon images similar. For this, a method such as "use erroneously easy Unicode letter" is used, but Google said that it was able to detect these fake applications. In fact, in 2017 we succeeded in deleting more than 250,000 counterfeit applications.


Google has also made progress in detecting apps that contain inappropriate content such as pornography, violence or illegal activity. By inspecting a large number of applications to be submitted for screening using an improved machine learning model, it will help people who inspect applications to effectively find malicious apps. As a result, in the year 2017, tens of thousands of apps containing inappropriate content were deleted.


In addition, applications that may be used for fraud, SMS-based fraud, Trojan horse, phishing scam, etc. are called "potentially harmful applications (PHAs)" and are categorized as malware. Although it seems that there are "few" apps classified as Google Iwaku PHA, threatening to Android users remains unchanged. We are also working on deleting these apps from Google Play, but at the same time we are working on "Google Play ProtectWe also started offering, and in 2017 the number of installed PHAs has decreased by 50% compared to the previous year.


In addition, we are developing a new detection model and technology to identify the network of developers and developers trying to deliver repeatedly malicious apps repeatedly. This makes it difficult for 100,000 malicious developers to be eliminated from Google Play in 2017 and malicious developers trying to create another new account and try to deliver malicious apps It is getting.

in Mobile,   Software,   Security, Posted by logu_ii