Google Play contains a huge amount of malware

Google has been increasingly hit by outbreaks of malicious apps on the Play Store lately - and it seems that the Internet giant is struggling to cope with the situation.

Computer security researcher Lukas Stefanko came across a copy of the popular MyEtherWallet scam application, designed to steal cryptocurrency and private keys. The worst part of the news is that according to the researcher, the malicious app was available on the Play Store for almost 4 days before Google removed it from its platform.

Fortunately, no one seems to have downloaded the app during the four-day period. The problem is that this is not the only similar product on the Google platform. The company already removed a copy of the MyEtherWallet wallet in January. In addition, the company recently removed the malicious application Poloniex, designed to phish users' private keys and credit data.

Although, according to the researcher, such projects hardly gain users, the latest copy of MyEtherWallet was downloaded by about five hundred users. This number was achieved mainly due to the fact that the application remained available for almost a week.

Another researcher, Troy Mursch, also said that Google has “no excuses” for its failure to prevent malware from appearing in its store. “Slow solutions to problems like these only encourage more problems to arise,” he tweeted.

To be clear, Google is not a software distributor that suffers from the spread of malware on its platform. Last December, another copy of MyEtherWallet appeared on the App Store. In fact, at one point there were three malicious apps in the finance section. According to reports, more than three thousand people downloaded the program before Apple removed it.

The real problem is that these are the apps that appear most often on the Play Store. Researchers from the cybersecurity firm RiskIQ discovered 661 illegal cryptocurrency applications on twenty sites - including the Play Store and App Store. Among the entire list of platforms, the Play Store leads the way, with a staggering number of such applications - 272. In second place is the APKFiles platform - 54 applications.

To be fair, it is worth mentioning that cryptocurrency malware makes up only a small fraction of all malware on the Play Store.. To be clear, the company removed 700,000 “problematic apps” in 2017. According to statistics, there are now 3.5 million apps available for download on the Play Market.

Last year, in an attempt to stop hackers, Google launched the Play Protect security feature, which ensures that all downloaded apps are legal. However, as Stefanko's research shows, this method is completely ineffective and it simply cannot keep up with the ever-evolving hacker attacks. If Google cannot find an effective counter to these crimes, it will only be a matter of time before they have problems.

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According to https://thenextweb.com