Google has floated an alliance with 3 anti-virus firms called the ‘App Defense Alliance’.
The 3 are: ESET, Zimperium & Lookout. ESET said in a press release that it had become the founding member of the Alliance to “protect the Google Play Store.” ESET will provide its detection capabilities & security for the Android ecosystem for this.
This alliance complements the existing partnerships that ESET already has with Google, including the integration with Chronicle, a division of Google Cloud, & the embedded ESET engine in Google Chrome Cleanup, a security tool that alerts Google Chrome users to potential threats.
“What was previously a reactive effort to catch security vulnerabilities is now a full-fledged and proactive campaign to protect billions of consumers and businesses at the source,” said Tony Anscombe, global security evangelist & industry partnership ambassador, ESET, in a written statement.
As a member of the App Defense Alliance, Google will provide Zimperium access to mobile apps as they are being queued to publish in the Google Play Store. Through Zimperium’s advanced machine-learning based z9 technology, it “will help identify & stop potentially harmful mobile apps before they ever make it onto Google Play.
“One of our strategic imperatives as a technology company is to relentlessly innovate,” said Jon Paterson, Zimperium’s Chief Technical Officer in a written statement. “We have continuously evolved our core technology and, as a result, become the benchmark standard for machine learning-based detection of mobile malware ensuring detection of zero day samples.”
What will the App Defense Alliance do?
The goal is to ensure the safety of the Google Play Store, quickly finding potentially harmful applications & stopping them from being published.
As part of this Alliance, the Google Play Protect detection systems will be integrated with each partner’s scanning engines. This will generate new app risk intelligence as apps are being queued to publish. Partners will analyze that dataset and act as another, vital set of eyes prior to an app going live on the Play Store, said Google on its official blog.
Image Credit: Google
