BERLIN: Computer scientists have developed new software that shows whether an app has accessed private data to spy on the user.

Apps on web-enabled mobile devices can be used to spy on their users, so researchers from the Saarland University in Germany developed the new software to track malicious activity by an app.

Last year at the end of July the Russian software company "Doctor Web" detected several malicious apps in the app store "Google Play", researchers said.

Downloaded on a Smartphone, the malware installed - without the permission of the user - additional programs which sent expensive text messages to premium services.

Although Doctor Web, according to its own statement, informed Google immediately, the malicious apps were still available for download for several days, researchers said.

Doctor Web estimates that in this way up to 25,000 Smartphones were used fraudulently.

The new software can discover such malicious apps already in the app store. The software detects pieces of code where the app accesses sensitive data and where data is sent from the mobile device.

If the software detects a connection between such a "source" and such a "sink", it reports that as suspect behavior.

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