By Jessie Huang
We recently found 49 new adware apps on Google Play, disguised as games and stylized cameras. These apps are typical adware, hiding themselves within mobile devices to show ads and deploying anti-uninstall and evasion functions. These apps are no longer live but before they were taken down by Google, the total number of downloads was more than 3 million.
This recent incident continues an ongoing trend of mobile adware surges — just last August we discovered 85 fake photography and gaming adware apps that also employed unique techniques to evade detection. These adware apps have been a long-running issue for mobile companies. Google needs to remove wave after wave — before the August batch of adware apps, there had also been over 100 adware apps found in July and adware that affected over 9 million users in January. We have been closely following mobile adware fraud for years and found these types of apps also quite prevalent in 2018. New versions are still constantly being uploaded, and we continue to monitor their progress.
Figure 1. Adware apps on Google Play
Behavior analysis
Similar to our previous disclosures, these latest apps disguise their icons and push full-screen ads onto a victim’s devi ..
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