In a report published by AV-Comparatives, an Austrian antivirus testing company, it has been found out that the majority of anti-malware and antivirus applications for Android are untrustworthy and ineffective.
While surveying 250 antivirus applications for Android, the company discovered that only 80 of them detected more than 30% of the 2,000 harmful apps they were tested with. Moreover, a lof of them showed considerably high false alarm rates.
The detailed version of the report showcased that the officials at AV-Comparatives selected 138 companies which are providing anti-malware applications on Google Play. The list included some of the most well-known names like Google Play Protect, Falcon Security Lab, McAfee, Avast, AVG, Symantec, BitDefender, VSAR, DU Master, ESET and various others.
ZDNet noted that the security researchers at AV-Comparatives resorted to manual testing of all the 250 apps chosen for the study instead of employing an emulator. The process of downloading and installing these infectious apps on an Android device was repeated 2,000 times which assisted the researchers in concluding the end result i.e., the majority of those applications are not reliable and effective to detect malware or virus.
However, the study conducted by AV-Comparatives also highlighted that some of the offered antivirus applications can potentially block malicious apps.
As some of the vendors did not bother to add their own package names into the white list, the associated antivirus apps detected themselves as infectious. Meanwhile, some of the antivirus applications were found with wildcards in order to allow packages starting with an extension like "com.adobe" which can easily be exploited by the hackers to breach security.
On a safer side, Google guards by its Play Protect which provides security from viruses on Android by default. Despite that, some users opt for anti-malware apps from third-party app stores or other unknown sources which affect safety on their devices.
The presence of malicious apps on Google Play was also noticed in the past and with the aforementioned study, Android is becoming an unsafe mobile platform.
