Delete these apps! 30 downloads filling phones with dangerous adware
Have you been downloading apps from Google Play recently? If so, you might want to scan through your phone for now. A new batch of malicious programs has been deleted from Google Play after it was found that they installed annoying adware and browser redirects without informing users.
If this sounds like déjà vu to you, you’re not wrong. The cycle of malware on Google Play getting discovered and promptly deleted has been going on for years now, and the problem doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon. Tap or click here to see the last batch of malware deleted from the Google Play store.
To help you secure your phone, we have the complete list of malicious apps to watch out for. If any of these are present on your device, you need to delete them now.
Surprise! New malicious adware found on Google Play Store
Security researchers working for WhiteOps have a new report detailing malicious apps that were present on the Google Play Store with millions of downloads. These programs primarily masqueraded as beauty filters and camera apps, but once installed by a user, they begin to spam advertisements and sudden redirects to scam websites.
Some of these apps took efforts to remove the malicious code to keep up the appearance of normalcy, but not all of them went this far. In fact, some apps continued spamming users over the course of several months starting back in late 2019 all the way up to mid-2020.
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To make matters worse, the malicious apps would sometimes delete their own app icon, which can make it difficult to find and uninstall them.
In response, Google did what it always does in this situation: Remove the offending apps. Unfortunately, this does little to mitigate the problem for victims who may have already installed the apps without knowing how dangerous they were.
In the nick of time: The offending apps
When malicious apps get removed from Google Play, it can be difficult to find out their specific names after the fact. Fortunately, we have the complete list of apps to examine your phone for and remove.
If you have any of these apps on your device, delete them immediately. Regardless of how fun or useful their features may seem, it’s not worth dealing with potentially dangerous advertisements and annoying redirects to spam and phishing websites. Here’s what you need to delete:
Watch out for scam sites claiming to sell COVID-19 treatments
One of the scariest things about this novel coronavirus is the fact that it’s never been seen in human populations before. As a newly discovered virus, we have no natural immunity, no vaccine and no known cures to treat the disease it causes.
The new coronavirus rip-off you need to watch out for
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People across America are staying indoors to protect themselves from COVID-19, but that doesn’t mean they’re safe from economic strife. More than 10 million Americans have lost their jobs in the last three weeks and scammers seem hellbent on making the economic pain even worse.