Android Apps Were Completely Removed Out Of Google Play Store Before December 2018

Jyotis - Dec 08, 2018

In spite of Google’s effort in protecting its app platform, ensuring 100% safety still lies out of the company’s hand.

Among a string of Android apps continuously updated in the Google Play store, we can still see some malicious apps making our smartphones hacked. Backdoors inside these apps help hackers to access users’ data on their smartphones more easily. In spite of Google’s effort in protecting its app platform, ensuring 100% safety still lies out of the company’s hand.

In his study, antivirus provider Sophos listed about 20 Android apps with backdoors which can make users accidentally download files from servers controlled by hackers. These apps have been downloaded over 2 million times.

Of which, there are some universal apps like Zombie Killer, Table Soccer, and Sparkle Flashlight. Notably, the app Sparkle Flashlight has been downloaded more than 1 million times since its first release in 2016. Sophos revealed the malicious backdoor code only appears on this app (as well as on the two abovementioned apps) when they were updated in March 2018.

Some Android apps were discovered with backdoors since they first appeared on the Google Play store while some just come into the light on June 2018.

Until November 2018, these apps left out of the Google Play store. They are useful tools that help hackers to run ads and create fake clicks to collect money. One notable thing is that even when you close them forcedly, these ads still kept running in the background and drained your smartphones’ batteries as well as data on the Internet.

Pesrepi Development Studio - The app developer offers a lot of backdoored apps

But that is not all! In fact, backdoors bring a lot of malware to your systems to run dangerous codes and steal users’ data. This is not a problem for only Android users, but for iOS ones because some of these apps are also available on the iOS platform. That means if you are using an iPhone, you may open the doors to welcome hackers.

As mentioned above, Google removed these apps out of its Google Play store; however, you shouldn’t think that your smartphone is safe right now.