Annual report: Almost 2.4 million apps banned from Google Play again
Google explains what it did in 2024 to combat malware apps in its own App Store and shows how many apps and developers were blocked.
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Countless Trojan apps regularly slip past protective measures in Google's App Store Play. Every year, the company presents countermeasures in a report and provides figures on apps removed, among other things.
What Google does
Trojan apps copy log-in data from online banking, for example, and forward it to criminals. Attackers also use this method to obtain other personal data such as credit card numbers.
The latest annual report for 2024 states that almost 2.4 million dangerous apps were blocked last year. According to Google, the malicious functions of these apps were detected by various mechanisms before they were published in the Play Store and the applications were blocked. In addition, 158,000 developer accounts were blocked and the unnecessary processing of personal information was prevented for 1.3 million apps.
According to Google, the analyses are carried out not only by automatic detection mechanisms but also by human reviewers, who are now supported by AI. In addition, Google's Play Protect real-time scanner is said to have detected and blocked 13 million malicious apps originating from third-party app stores. The approach scans every app on an Android device, regardless of where it comes from.
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Tilting at windmills?
But is Google Play now a safe(er) place? According to Google, it also blocked more than 2 million Trojan apps in 2023. In 2024, the IT security company IT-Scaler came across 200 malware apps with a total of eight million installations.
The fight against apps with malicious code in app stores therefore continues and Google obviously needs to invest more work in making the Play Store a truly secure place.
(des)
