One in three Android apps on non-Google stores are malicious, study finds

Research by Opswat suggests as many as a third of apps on unofficial app stores contain malicious code

Alex Hern
theguardian.com, Friday 18 April 2014 14.37 EDT

Almost a third of Android apps on third-party app stores contain some form of malicious software, according to research from cybersecurity firm Opswat.

Knock-off versions of popular apps such as Twitter and Angry Birds dominate the list of suspicious downloads, while one-shot joke apps such as 'screen crack' make up the rest.

The firm downloaded almost 12,000 app files from various sources of Android apps other than the official Google Play store, and loaded them into their proprietary anti-malware system Metascan, which flagged 32% of the apps as suspicious.

Metascan works by using multiple anti-malware libraries, and the majority of the apps it highlighted were marked as malware by just one service. Additionally, many files were picked up because they had been classified as adware, "which is not universally considered malware," says Opswat's director of professional services, Dan Lanir.

(More here.)