Con-artists and other unscrupulous individuals now have a new weapon to unleash their wrath to unsuspecting individuals. With technology being one of the most important things that we now have, they have jumped into the bandwagon and have used them as front to their modus.
With app developers and apps sprouting out from nowhere, it is evident that these devious criminals are going to take advantage of the situation and use this for their benefit.
Case in point, mobile security firm Lookout recently discovered that nearly half of the free Android apps in the market have been using their apps as fronts for advertising networks and services.
They also found out that about 5% of them employs “aggressive” tactics bordering on malware classification.
Lookout says that wallpaper apps include aggressive advertising at a rate of 17%. Entertainment apps and games on the other hand follow that with 8% and 7% of the aggressive pie.
Aggressive advertising implies taking the form of ads creating their own desktop shortcuts, pushing ads to a device’s notification bars and modifying the bookmarks and homepage of a device’s default web browser.
By the way, the 5% of apps involved that are borderline malware represent more than 80 million downloads.
Watch what you’re downloading and installing in your smartphone!
Image Source: google-play.net
