Android antivirus: has become anecdotal! An agency specializing in antivirus testing published the results of a survey this week.
The findings are not encouraging for those trying to protect their Android device. About two-thirds of antivirus for Android are fraudulent and do not work as advertised.
The exhibition, which was published by the Austrian company AV-Comparatives, and was the result of an exhaustive testing process carried out in January 2019. The company examined 250 applications Android antivirus available on the official Google Play Store.
The results of the report are tragic, as some antivirus apps were malware, and they come to show the sad situation in Android antivirus.
Android antivirus: Only 80 from 250 applications passed a basic crawl test
The AV-Comparatives team said that out of 250 apps tested, only 80 managed to detect more than 30% of malicioussoftware they had installed on the test devices.
The tests weren't that complicated. The researchers installed each antivirus application on a separate device and automated a few functions on each device: open a program tours, to download a malicious application and then install it.
This did 2.000 times for each application, and each test device downloaded 2.000 from the most common malware for Android that has been released since last year.
AV-Comparatives executives stated that many of the security applications did not detect the applications being downloaded to the device at all, but used white/black lists of allowed package names installation.
In fact, some of the security applications reported every app installed on the user's phone as malicious, by default, if the package name of each application did not exist on the white list.
In other cases, some security applications used wildcards in the white list, with entries such as "com.adobe. *".
In these cases, malware would have to use a package called "com.adobe.whatever" to install comfortably on an Android device.
The company said 170 from 250 virus detection applications for Android failed in the most basic crawl tests.
"Most of the above applications, as well as the dangerous applications already mentioned, appear to have been developed by either amateur developers or software developers unaware of security," says AV-Comparatives.
"Examples of the latter category are developers who make all kinds of applications for monetization or just want to have a security app for Android in their portfolio for publicity purposes," the researchers said.
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