Google removes over 29 dangerous photography apps: Here’s the list

The phenomenon of malware inserted into legitimate applications has always been an important scourge of Android and the Play Store. Google has always tried to ” plug ” the situation by eliminating the applications or tightening the rules of acceptance of the same in the virtual store.

Last, only in chronological order, Trend Micro‘s discovery of a series of malicious applications that for a long time have acted undisturbed, postponing users to fraudulent sites or even stealing images in the phone’s memory.

Malicious app: This is how they acted

Specifically, the malicious applications found by Trend Micro are 29 and have been downloaded by users for millions and millions of times. This is because they promised to improve the photographic shots by ensuring changes to the original images.

In reality, applications displayed large-sized advertising banners allowing easy pishing attacks. Not only that, some of them were even difficult to uninstall as the icon was not visible in the launcher even if the phone was still present.

Some applications were going to display full-screen banners when the user unlocked the smartphone. The problem also came at the instant when the user tapped on it, involuntarily or perhaps to eliminate the banner itself, by activating the immediate download of a paid player. Other applications even allowed to steal user data thanks to the promise of winnings of products of various kinds.

Not only because most of the applications to the promise of beautifying photos with easy filters or tweaks, requiring access to phone memory and uploading images to their remote servers then required to update the application to see the edited photo.

All false because the link that appeared only led to fraudulent sites. As always, we renew our advice to install only applications that you are sure of the origin and knowledge after having even read the reviews of the same.

Here is the list of incriminated applications and removed from the Play Store: