ID: IRCNE2012111665
Date: 2012-11-05
According to “TechWorld”, one-quarter of more than 400,000 Android apps examined in the Google Play store pose security risks to mobile-device users, according to new research.
Security vendor Bit9 categorised these Android apps as "questionable" or "suspicious" because they could gain access to personal information to collect GPS data, phone calls or phone numbers and much more after the user granted "permission" to the app. "You have to say 'yes' to the application or it won't run," pointed out Harry Sverdlove, Bit9 CTO. Games, entertainment and wallpaper apps especially seem to want to grab data, even though their functions would seem to have little direct use for it.
Bit9 notes this doesn't mean these apps are malware, but they could do damage if compromised because the user has granted so much permission.
There are said to be about 600,000 apps in Google Play, and Sverdlove says Bit9 is now compiling a "reputation" database of Android apps. The firm is also going to move on to other app stores, including those from Apple and Amazon, in order to create mobile security products that can protect users based on risk-scoring of apps.
Reputation-based approaches have become commonly used throughout the security industry for protecting Web users, for example, against malware-infested sites, and now there's interest in applying similar ideas to analyzing risk associated with mobile apps.
Broken down, Bit9 categorised these "questionable" and "suspicious" apps it found in Google Play this way:
- 42 percent access GPS location data, and these include wallpapers, games and utilities
- 31 percent access phone calls or phone numbers
- 26 percent access personal data, such as contacts and email
- 9 percent use permissions that can cost the user money
In its report, Bit9 describes its methodology as crawling Google Play to collect detailed information about 412,000 mobile apps.
Of the 412,222 Android apps evaluated from Google Play, Bit9 says more than 290,000 of them access at least one high-risk permission, 86,000 access five or more and 8,000 apps access 10 or more permissions "flagged as potentially dangerous."
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