Google Play Store has come in for a serious criticism as of
late, with various alerts about malware-laced apps which have frequently been
on the store for quite a long time, or even years, and which have been
installed by a huge number of users.
This most recent cautioning concerns four VPNs and two
selfie apps, with in excess of 500 million installs between them, all of which
contain harmful adware and which look for hazardous system permissions that can
exact serious harm.
Regardless of significant efforts to clean house the issue
stays pervasive and users stay in danger.
Google Play Protect is therefore one storefront intended to
make preparations against application vulnerabilities and, in 2018, Google
“detected and removed malicious developers faster, and stopped more malicious
apps from entering the Google Play Store than ever before. The number of
rejected app submissions increased by more than 55%, and we increased app
suspensions by more than 66%."
However, once more the warnings still remain that dangerous
applications are as yet accessible for install on Google's official store.
First was a notice from security researcher Andy Michael
around four Android VPNs that are 'bombarding devices' with false ads—creating
income for their operators to the detriment of the organizations setting the
advertisements.
Second, was a notice from security researchers at Wandera
that two camera filter apps with more than 1.5 million installs between them
have been tainting devices with adware.
In any case Google's Android (and Apple's iOS) is making it
progressively simple for users to track permissions granted and application
misuse now and every user has been informed to take advantage of every one of
the protections set up, clicking with caution and keeping their smartphones
protected from the would-be-intruders to every extent they can.
This is all in light of the fact that the clever malware
attacks still exist out there—and they can be very difficult to detect.
