Adware - risk for Android apps

Adware is a type of malicious software that secretly installs itself on your device and displays advertisements. In some cases, adware can even track your online behaviour and display personalized ads.

Adware generates revenue for its developer by automatically displaying online advertisements in the user interface of the software or on a screen that pops up in the user’s face during the installation process.

With more than 60,000 Android apps posing as legitimate software have been secretly infecting the devices of unsuspecting users with adware over the course of the last six months. A recent report on a New batch of Android adware apps remained undetected for the past six months. It spreads a shocking wave in the industry.

The modus of operandi is , none of these 60,000+ adware apps were hosted on the Google Play Store. Instead, the cybercriminals behind this campaign abused Google Search to drive users to their third-party websites.

If a user does click on one of these sites in their search engine, they are redirected to other websites that show ads or prompt them to download the app they were searching for. However, these download sites were created to distribute malicious Android apps as APK files that need to be side-loaded instead of installed through an official app store.

According to a blog post from Bitdefender, the malware powering these adware apps has “been live since at least October 2022” and it appears that this entire campaign is fully automated due to the high number of unique samples discovered.

Once adware hijacks your device, it might carry out all sorts of unwanted tasks. The software's functions may be designed to analyze the location and which Internet sites you visit, and then present advertising pertinent to the types of goods or services featured there.

Spreading adware is a big challenge. Adware developers often bundle their software with freeware or shareware programs. This means that when users download the free program, they are also unknowingly downloading the adware, are Drive-by downloads can occur when a user visits a malicious website, or when they open an infected email attachment.