Antivirus mobile apps are here, and they aren’t who they purport to be.
RiskIQ today reveals it has identified hundreds of malicious antivirus apps, capitalising on ransomware fears and putting users at risk.
Using RiskIQ’s mobile database, hundreds of examples of apps that claimed to help defend mobile phones were found to be preying on unsuspecting users by pushing adware, trojans, and other malware.
Using a title search for “Antivirus” resulted in 6,295 total apps, past and present, claiming to either be an antivirus solution, review antivirus solutions or be associated with antivirus software in some way. More than 700 of these apps triggered blacklist detections from the aggregated antivirus vendors in VirusTotal. Trimming the dataset to compare apps only coming from the Google Play store showed 655 results. Of those, 131 had triggered blacklist detections.
Please see the full blog for further insight and findings here: https://www.riskiq.com/blog/external-threat-management/malicious-antivirus-apps/