There are many camera and photo apps on Google Play Store which help an online user in taking photos in different styles with various filters as well as assist in beautifying them.
However, this is not the only function that is performed by these apps; some of them also push full screen ads in between, sometimes adult ads too while few of them are used to cheat the user by stealing his/her personal data. Several of these apps even steal the uploaded photos and give the user a false update prompt.
Recently, Google has pulled down 29 such camera and photo apps but what is more worrying is that out of these 29 apps, 11 apps have been downloaded for more than 100,000 times while 3 apps have been downloaded for more than million times which means that the number of victims is huge.
It is not easy to find out these apps as they use multiple compression archives to get saved from analysis. Not only this, thick encryption layer is also used for hiding their remote servers.
In fact, the user would have problem in removing them as well in view of the fact that they won’t appear in the app list and no connection can be seen between the ads and the apps.
Google needs to find a way to stop such malicious apps from entering the Play Store otherwise many more users will become victims of cyber crime.