Over the years Android users have received several advisories to safeguard their devices from malware attacks due to Android vulnerability issue. This time, once again, a new set of malicious apps were found in the Google Play Store. The tech giant has already confirmed the news and removed these apps from the app store. Now, if you are an Android user then you need to check your phone immediately and uninstall these malicious apps which are designed to open backdoors onto a vulnerable device by pulling separate malware apps from other sources.
Soon after Google launched new "App Defence Alliance" to fix the Android malware issues and to confirm the safety of the Play Store, the company asked the users to secure their systems by uninstalling those malicious apps. It should be mentioned that when a user downloads and installs these compromised apps in an Android device, they easily mask themselves from the users.
As per the researchers at Wandera, these apps do not contain ad fraud malware themselves, as these apps only download malware "payload" apps and drop them in the corrupted systems. In this case, both, the dropper app and the payload app, should be identified and deleted. It should be mentioned that the dropper apps pull the malware payloads from Github, said Wandera VP Michael Covington.
While launching the new defence system, Google announced that the App Defense Alliance has been set up to instantly detect potentially harmful android applications and stop them from being published. For this new initiative, Google joined hands with three more security companies ESET, Lookout, and Zimperium and their main focus is set to notice "the integration of Google Play Protect detection systems with each partner's scanning engines."
However, after the detection of these seven malicious apps, which have been downloaded thousands and not millions of times, the security researchers at Wandera notified Google and the company immediately removed those apps from Play Store. If you still have these apps in your Android device, then uninstall them immediately.
Wandera also shared the package names for the APKs found on GitHub. Here is the list-
