For several months, Google didn’t notice that a malicious app in the official Play Store was trading on the name of its own Chrome browser. Not long after, a scam app hiding behind WhatsApp’s name was caught too.
Google clearly has a hard time keeping malicious apps off the Play Store, and clones, meaning programs that imitate other popular apps, are one of the nastier kinds.
At the start of the week, researchers reported a fake Google Chrome app that had been downloaded more than 100,000 times before it was removed from the store. After that, a fake WhatsApp was identified that at least half a million people had already downloaded. Fortunately, it’s no longer available either.
The app abusing WhatsApp’s name and branding showed up among the sponsored results when users searched for the app by name, which raised the odds of a successful deception.
The fake Chrome was uploaded by a developer called Hizbartech, at first as a different application. The developer later swapped the name and icon for Google Chrome and its familiar round logo. After that, the developer presumably paid a considerable sum to get the fake app featured at the top of the results. So anyone who typed “Chrome” into the Play Store could easily find themselves facing the impostor, which made a download more likely.
The current assumption is that the fake “WhatsApp” abused the Google Play “Early Access” program. The program disables public user reviews for participating apps, which can make it harder for users to tell fake programs from real ones.
According to Play Store data, the deceptive app was published last month and has since logged more than 500,000 downloads. That’s a strikingly high number for a fake app, though still far below the real WhatsApp’s more than 10 billion downloads.
What’s hard to understand is how this case stayed unnoticed for more than a month despite Google Play’s security checks.
(Source: AndroidAuthority. Photo: Unsplash)
