Android has never been known for its secure operating system, with analysts predicting malware on the platform to hit unprecedented heights in 2015, overtaking Windows PC malware.
BadNews is a new malware bug found by security researchers running tests. While 35 apps were added to the Google Play store without malware but in a recent update, they came with malware ridden code hidden inside.
BadNews for Android users
Bitdefender, the security researchers, found three more apps out of the 32 found previously. Google has since removed all these apps from the store, but they were already downloaded over nine million times before the removal.
The apps containing BadNews code upload the user phone number, serial codes and other identifiers, other data and then offer illegitimate downloads disguised as real updates to Skype and other services.
BadNews is not a new piece of malicious code and it has taken almost six months to notice the problem in applications, with the first code added around June 2012.
This has revealed a pretty large gap in the cloud-based security service, Google Bouncer, which was added to the Google Play Store by Google last year, to detect malware and other viruses hidden in applications.
We believe Google will be looking for a work around this gap in the security, possibly by scanning every app update before it comes out. This may time costly to some app developers, but it will maintain security on the Google Play Store.
Out of the nine million possible downloads, infected devices could be much lower. To actually activate the malicious malware, the adware presented at the start needs to be downloaded.
Anyone who does not take the third party download, disguised as a normal update to a popular app, will not get the malicious code and will not have been infected with malware.
Android: The new malware hub
Google has worked hard in the past few years to really get a grasp of the malware problem flooding Android. With an open source design, it has been harder for Google to make big steps in this security movement.
Comparing the operating system to iOS, with little to no malware at all due to rigors reviewing processes, we can see Google is going to have a hard time competing on the security front.
One of the main ways to tackle malware is with anti-virus and security on your phone, for iOS users, this will be foreign but for Android users, it can save your data from being stolen.
Windows has had this problem for a long time and Android users will have to take the same precautions with their mobile device as they did with their PC.
It is likely we will see more malware problems in the future for Android, we just hope with later updates on Android they will improve on security.
