Google Play removed 700,000 illegal applications in 2017
On Tuesday, Google announced that it had removed 700,000 malicious applications from the Google Play Store in 2017, up 70% from the previous year. Clearing up the malicious app in the Play Store app store is a long-term task for Google, but it’s now even easier.
Today, more than 2 billion Android devices rely on apps from the Play Store, and apps are needed for take-outs or for raising a frog. Although these apps provide many interesting and useful features, they can also cause some problems.
In April last year, cyber-security company ESET found that a seemingly harmless flashlight application in the Play Store is actually malware that could potentially steal user bank card information. Avast, another anti-virus company, also found similar behavior across multiple applications. Last September, Google removed 50 malicious applications that had millions of downloads.
Although a handful of malicious applications escaped Google’s censorship into the Play Store, Google said: “99% of malicious applications were identified and deleted before they were first installed.”
Andrew Ahn, Google’s Play Store product manager, wrote in a blog post: “Google can now identify and remove applications with inappropriate content, malicious, and forgery by machine learning. The algorithm detects developers trying to abuse the Play Store app store, and Google believes most app developers are for the sake of the user, but there are still some malicious developers trying to escape the censorship of devices that put the user on the Play Store at risk The fact that the Play Store is so large and global in scope makes it a target for malicious developers, with Google announcing 100,000 malicious developer accounts in 2017. ”
Most of the applications that were removed were counterfeit applications, and developers of these counterfeit applications tried to duplicate the patterns of popular applications. Google said it has shelved more than 250,000 fake apps in 2017. Last November, a fake application disguised as the popular live chat tool “WhatsApp” was removed by Google and had more than 1 million downloads before it was taken off the shelf.
Google said its new detection algorithms detect more violent applications more effectively and reduce the number of users who download malicious applications from their Play Store. The company also mentioned that since the Google Play Protect tool, which scans for violating apps on mobile phones, has effectively reduced the number of harmful apps by 10% from 2016. In addition, the probability of downloading a malicious application from the Google Play Store is 10 times less than that of other third-party sources.
