Internet related News · 2016-04-20

Google Android’s on-going war against harmful apps

harmful android apps

Google Android claims to have got even better at detecting Potentially Harmful Apps (PHAs) in the last year.

In a report, ‘Android Security 2015 Report’, released for the 2nd year in a row, the highlights of which were posted on the Google Online Security blog, Adrian Ludwig, Lead Engineer, Android Security, claims to have “significantly improved” machine learning & event correlation to detect potentially harmful behavior.

Some of the report highlights:

  • We (Google Android Security) protected users from malware & other PHAs, checking over 6 billion installed applications per day.
  • We protected users from network-based and on-device threats by scanning 400 million devices per day.
  • & we protected hundreds of millions of Chrome users on Android from unsafe Websites with Safe Browsing.

Adrian said Google Security “continued to make it even more difficult to get PHAs into Google Play.” Last year’s enhancements reduced the probability of installing a PHA from Google Play by over 40% compared to 2014.

Within Google Play, install attempts of most categories of PHAs declined including:

  • Data Collection: decreased over 40% to 0.08% of installs
  • Spyware: decreased 60% to 0.02% of installs
  • Hostile Downloader: decreased 50% to 0.01% of installs
  • Overall, PHAs were installed on fewer than 0.15% of devices that only get apps from Google Play.
  • About 0.5% of devices that install apps from both Play & other sources had a PHA installed during 2015, similar to the data in last year’s report.

Click here to catch up with the rest of the blog post as well as the report.

 
Image Credit: Google security blog 

 

 

 

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