91 Percent of All Android Antivirus Apps are Frauds: New Study

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People often do care about the gadgets they are using whether it is a computer or smartphone, doesn’t matter when it comes to the malware. An attacker would have found the new gates to push their malware in the system and steal the data. And to prevent it, of course, antivirus software is the prior solution. While there are plenty of antivirus apps available on the Google Play Store, only 23 applications passed the new test.

An Austrian antivirus testing organization, AV-Comparatives has a report of the testing process done on a total of 250 Android antivirus applications available on Google Play Store. Of course, results are really funny because some of the antivirus apps are detecting their own apps as malware which puts the antivirus industry in shame.

Image Courtesy: AV-Comparatives

Some antivirus apps don’t actually scan apps

AV-Comparatives staff members said that out of the 250 apps checked, some of the antivirus applications don’t actually scan the apps that user is downloading or installing on the device. Apps use the whitelist/blacklist method to show other apps as safe or not instead of scanning their codes.

So, essentially, some antivirus apps would mark any app installed on an Android device as malicious by default, if the app’s package name is included in a blacklist. And this is why some of the antivirus applications selected themselves a malicious app because the developer forgot to add its own app package name in the whitelist.

AV-Comparatives followed a simple method to check 250 antivirus apps. They have installed each app from the Google Play Store on each of the different devices and started basic scanning process on each of the smartphones. Out of the 250, 170 apps had failed the basic detection test.

“Most of the above apps, as well as the risky apps already mentioned, appear to have been developed either by amateur programmers or by software manufacturers that are not focused on the security business,” the AV-Comparatives staff said.

Furthermore, there are some apps having the same user interface. That means the app has been developed by the same developer. Another thing is many apps are intended to show ads on the screen instead of having the animation of malware scanning.