A Worrying Two-Thirds Of Android Antivirus Apps Are Apparently Frauds

Antivirus apps are meant to give you peace of mind where in the event you accidentally click on that suspicious link or email, you know that your device should be somewhat protected. Unfortunately there are so many antivirus apps out there that it can be a bit difficult to choose which one to go for, and the sad thing is that most of them are apparent frauds.

This is according to testing done by Austrian antivirus testing company AV-Comparatives (via ZDNet) who discovered that out of the 250 Android antivirus apps that they tested, they found that two-thirds of them could be considered frauds. They tested the apps out by feeding malware to the devices to see if the apps could pick up on them, and only 80 of the 250 apps did.

However even then those 80 apps could only pick up more than 30% of the malware, meaning that quite a bit got through. The company also found that quite a few of these apps weren’t even scanning for malware. Instead what these apps did what rely on a whitelist/blacklist based on the package names of apps. This resulted in some apps on Android devices being marked as malicious simply because their package name was not in their whitelist.

They also found that a disturbing number of these apps were created by the same programmer on some kind assembly line, where most of these apps look similar to each other, with the focus being more on pushing ads rather than actual protection. It is a bit worrying but if you are interested in protecting yourself, you can check out our list of the 5 best antivirus software.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Android, Apps, Malware, Security, study