Google has partnered with mobile security companies EST, Lookout, and Zimperium to help identify malicious apps before they are published on the Play Store. The companies have created App Defence Alliance; it will allow the three partners to integrate Google Play Protect detection into their own scanning engines which will add an extra layer of protection for all the apps that are queued to get published, Google said. How is this different from Google Play protect? While Google Play Protect scans the Play Store and highlights malicious apps, the App Defense Alliance scans apps before they are listed on the Play Store. This protects the users from downloading any such apps accidentally. Google's problems with fake apps: The Google Play Store had over 2,000 fake apps as of June, according to a cybersecurity study by the University of Sydney and Data61-CSIRO. These fake apps were duplicates of popular games such as Temple Run, Free Flow, and Hill Climb Racing, and many of them contained malware and requested dangerous data access permissions. The study had advised users to perform the following checks before downloading apps to avoid being hacked: Do the homework: Find out which platforms and countries the new app has been officially released in, as hackers may target those platforms and countries where these popular apps are yet to be released. Be mindful of cross-market counterfeits: Check if an app has been released on both Android and iOS as hackers sometimes release fake versions of popular apps that are only…
Please subscribe to MediaNama. Don't share prints and PDFs.
You May Also Like
News
Google has released a Google Travel Trends Report which states that branded budget hotel search queries grew 179% year over year (YOY) in India, in...
Advert
135 job openings in over 60 companies are listed at our free Digital and Mobile Job Board: If you’re looking for a job, or...
News
By Aroon Deep and Aditya Chunduru You’re reading it here first: Twitter has complied with government requests to censor 52 tweets that mostly criticised...
News
Rajesh Kumar* doesn’t have many enemies in life. But, Uber, for which he drives a cab everyday, is starting to look like one, he...