11 Android Apps mottled for secretly garnering users data
In the past couple of months alone, we've warned you more times than this writer can count on the fingers of one hand of various scary threats to everything from your bank account to your passwords to all kinds of financial services and money transfer platforms again.
But while some of these extremely dangerous trojans were carefully hidden inside moderately popular apps or sketchy apps made to look legit to an unsuspecting eye, the absolutely massive data-harvesting operation uncovered by a group of security analysts at a company called AppCensus is "special" and surprising (even to us) for a number of reasons.
The culprits are both diverse and widely used around the world
First and foremost, the number of possible victims is simply staggering, at 60 million... and counting. That's right, "at least" 60 million people are estimated to have installed the malicious apps listed below, according to The Wall Street Journal:
- Speed Camera Radar
- Al-Moazin Lite (Prayer Times)
- Wi-Fi Mouse (remote control PC)
- QR & Barcode Scanner (developed by AppSource Hub)
- Qibla Compass - Ramadan 2022
- Simple weather & clock widget (developed by Difer)
- Handcent Next SMS-Text with MMS
- Smart Kit 360
- Al Quran MP3 - 50 Reciters & Translation Audio
- Full Quran MP3 - 50+ Languages & Translation Audio
- Audiosdroid Audio Studio DAW
While Google promises to have verified them as no longer invasive and problematic before relisting them, we feel like it's a matter of principle (and common sense) to look for alternatives with a... superior reputation. More importantly, those who've installed these apps before AppCensus made its discovery and published the conclusions of its research should definitely hit "delete" despite a recent halt of their unauthorized data-collecting behavior.
To be perfectly clear, we're talking about all kinds of sensitive information here, ranging from email addresses to phone numbers, passwords, and perhaps scariest of all, precise GPS location history, which a shady company called Measurement Systems paid presumably big money to harvest via a third-party SDK (software development kit) integrated into the apps listed above.
