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Apps on Google Play Disguised as Security Tools Instead Serve Ads and Track Users' Location

posted by martyb on Friday January 05 2018, @03:50PM   Printer-friendly
from the the-play's-the-thing-where-I'll-capture... dept.

fliptop writes:

TrendMicro has discovered 36 apps in Google Play that execute unwanted behavior:

These apps posed as useful security tools under the names Security Defender, Security Keeper, Smart Security, Advanced Boost, and more. They also advertised a variety of capabilities: scanning, cleaning junk, saving battery, cooling the CPU, locking apps, as well as message security, WiFi security, and so on.

The apps were actually able to perform these simple tasks, but they also secretly harvested user data, tracked user location, and aggressively pushed advertisements.

The apps in question have been removed from Google Play.

Related: Google Pauses Crackdown on Apps That Use Accessibility Features

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 06 2018, @11:36AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 06 2018, @11:36AM (#618714)

    If your kids are indoors, staring at screens all day, then their eyes won't develop properly, and you'll have to buy them prescription spectacles for the rest of their lives.

    Outside of school, I spent most of my childhood wandering in the local woods, hills and moorlands, I'd be up at the crack of dawn and my parents wouldn't see me again until the sun was going down. Now, I've seriously pisspoor eyesight and have had so since my teenage years, long before I ever got my grubby little mitts on my own computer and an account on one of the local college's mainframes.

    I suppose if it isn't genetics, in my case the killer was books..I could read from about the age of 3, by the age of 5 I was working my way through a late Victorian copy of 'The Pickwick Papers' [wikipedia.org] (You can image my surprise and dismay when I finally got to London in my early 20s, my 'geographical references' were over a hundred years out of date) and I have something like 7,000 'real' books in my collection (down from over 10,000), and I'd hate to tell you how many e-books I've got (And let's not get started on electronics datasheets and application notes..)