That means that 170 of the 250 Android antivirus apps had failed the organization's most basic detection tests, and were, for all intent and purposes, a sham. The organization said it considered the 30 percent detection mark (with zero false positives) as a threshold between legitimate antivirus apps and those it considered ineffective or downright unsafe. In these cases, all a malware strain had to do was to use a package name of "com.adobe." to bypass the scans of tens of Android antivirus products. In other cases, some antivirus apps used wildcards in their whitelist, with entries such as "com.adobe.*". This is why some antivirus apps detected themselves as malicious when the apps' authors forgot to add their own package names to the whitelist. AV-Comparatives staffers said that many antivirus apps didn't actually scan the apps the user was downloading or installing, but merely used a whitelist/blacklist approach, and merely looked at the package names (instead of their code).Įssentially, some antivirus apps would mark any app installed on a user's phone as malicious, by default, if the app's package name wasn't included in its whitelist.
However, results didn't reflect this basic assumption. Some apps don't actually scan for malware They did this 2,000 times for each app, having the test device download 2,000 of the most common Android malware strains found in the wild last year -meaning that all antivirus apps should have already indexed these strains a long time ago.
Researchers installed each antivirus app on a separate device (no emulator involved) and automated the device to open a browser, download a malicious app, and then install it. The AV-Comparatives team said that out of the 250 apps they've tested, only 80 detected more than 30 percent of the malware they threw at each app during individual tests. Only 80 of 250 apps passed a basic detection test The report's results are tragicomical -with antivirus apps detecting themselves as malware- and come to show the sorry state of Android antivirus industry, which appears to be filled with more snake-oilers than actual cyber-security vendors. The report, published by Austrian antivirus testing outfit AV-Comparatives, was the result of a grueling testing process that took place in January this year and during which the organization's staff looked at 250 Android antivirus apps available on the official Google Play Store. Ukrainian developers share stories from the war zoneĪn organization specialized in testing antivirus products concluded in a report published this week that roughly two-thirds of all Android antivirus apps are a sham and don't work as advertised.
Linux distros for beginners: You can do this! Got questions about crypto? Ask the Coachįor Mom: The best flower delivery services How ransomware attacks threaten our food supply
0 kommentar(er)
