Android anti-malware apps tested for effectivity and here’s what was found.
It has been a while that these apps have been tested for effectivity. The results are quite alarming.
A lot of people are relying on ratings and reviews, however, this is not 100 percent accurate unless proven and tested.
Because of the need for Android security, amateurs are trying to cash in on Google’s Play Store by creating their own that offer little or no protection against security threats.
Researchers from independent testing lab AV Comparatives downloaded 110 anti-malware apps from Google Play, including reputable brands such as Symantec, ESET, F-Secure, Avast, and Kaspersky.
As expected, the genuine anti-malware products were able to achieve detection rates between 90 and 100 percent accuracy.
They conducted 100,000 test runs with the chosen apps against a set of the top 1000 Android malware threats from 2016, and found that only 24 of the 110 security products detected all malicious Android packages.
According to AV Comparatives report, twenty-one apps detected between 90.2 and 99.9 percent of malware samples.
A further 21 anti-malware apps fell into the 30 percent or lower detection rate category, which AV Comparatives deems as unsafe and unacceptably low.
Here’s the twist, we are not surprised that some programs do not even have the capability of detecting at all and sure enough, there were a few that were full of bugs and wont run nor install at all.
To make matters worse, five of them collected personally sensitive data from user devices and have false claims.
The said anti-malware product testing was conducted last January and during that time, google removed ten anri-malware apps from the Play Store during the testing period.
Among the removed apps were those that were determined to be unsafe, low protection scores, and some that were amateurly coded that might have come from non-security based businesses and some of them have no privacy policy that have been required by Google.
Although there were some reputable developers, their apps did not score that well and was only developed for marketing reasons.
It is not much of a market for Android security. But visibility by having an Android app on Google Play store helps to promote their other products which might include Windows security programs.
Users can not rely on ratings or reviews with regards to Android anti-malware security.
A lot of people have been crashed and burned by this, and the best example was a fake anti-malware application named Virus Shield that was somehow distributed via Google Play last 2014.
Virus Shield had no malicious code in it but it was pretty much of a scam due to the fact it had no security functionality at all.
Ratings and reviews have not helped avoid bad and poor quality products. This includes the useless and scam-like anti-malware apps on Google Play. Reviews and ratings can be manipulated.
“Of the apps tested for this report, practically all had a rating of 4 or higher, even though a number of them turned out to be ineffective,” the researchers wrote.
