240 advertising applications were detected on Android. How can we be protected from more than 14 million downloads to date?
The latest Play Store analysis reveals the discovery of 240 ad apps on Android . While these apps are showing ads without permission, they have been downloaded more than 14 million times to date.
Google removed more than 240 Android apps from the Play Store for displaying non-app ads and violating a newly introduced Google policy against such unauthorized ads.
Out-of- app ads are known as mobile ads that show outside of an app's normal usage times. They can appear as pop-up or full screen ads and consume user mobile data as much as possible.
According to a report from ad fraud detection firm White Ops, more than 240 Android apps have been discovered that show users non-app ads . Ads in apps were found to appear to be from legitimate apps to circumvent the Google Play firewall.
White Ops called this group RainbowMix and announced that they caught their first signs of activity early April this year. Most of the ad apps were game related (duplicate names of actual games). The duplicate apps contained a line of malicious code known as "com.timuz", which is responsible for displaying ads.
White Ops found that more than 240 apps had more than 14 million downloads this year alone, with the entire operation showing more than 15 million ads a day.
You don't have to worry about downloading these apps from Play Store as they are removed by Google . However, if you think you've downloaded it to your device before, it's a good idea to uninstall it as soon as possible. The full names of more than 240 apps from the RainboxMix campaign are listed in White Ops' blog post .
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