100,000 Android Apps Are Suspicious: Report
Bangalore: Nearly 100,000 Google Play apps are “Suspicious” or “questionable” posing potential security risk to the users as per the recent survey.
“A significant percentage of Google Play apps have access to potentially sensitive and confidential information,” Harry Sverdlove, chief technology officer of Bit9 said in a statement. “When a seemingly basic app such as wallpaper requests access to GPS data, this raises a red flag.”
“Likewise, more than a quarter of the apps can access email and contacts unbeknown to the phone user, which is of great concern when these devices are used in the workplace.” He added.
The report says that 9 percent of the apps use permissions which can cost the users money, 26 percent can get access to the personal details like contacts and emails, 31 percent can get access to phone numbers or calls, 42 percent can get access to the GPS location of the users, and 72 percent apps use at least one high-risk permission.
Bit9 also found out that about 75 percent of the apps in the sample of 293,496, are available for free downloads. When the search for “Angry Birds” done on Google Play, 115 apps got listed matching the key words, only 4 of them were from Rovio Mobile, the official game developer. The situation raises serious concerns over user security, Bit9 said.
Another analysis was carried out by Juniper Network’s Mobile Threat Center (MTS) over 1.7 million apps on Google Play between March 2011 to September 2012. It stated that most apps pried on users’ details, putting users in vulnerable spot.
Juniper wrote, "We found a significant number of applications contain permissions and capabilities that could expose sensitive data or access device functionality that they might not need."
Juniper said, “Free apps, in particular, are 401 percent more likely to track location and 314 percent more likely to access user address books than their paid counterparts.”
