Google Play News: Company Confirms Removal of 700,000 Apps in 2017
Up to 700,000 malicious applications were removed from Android's Google Play before 2017 ended, the company recently confirmed.
In an update posted on Android's Developers Blog, Google said more than 700,000 apps have been removed from Google Play. The total number of taken down apps was 70 percent more than the number of software products removed from the digital store platform in the previous year.
"Not only did we remove more bad apps, we were able to identify and action against them earlier," Google said. The company added that 99 percent of the over 700,000 malicious apps "were identified and rejected" even before a single Android user could place them on a device.
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"This was possible through significant improvements in our ability to detect abuse - such as impersonation, inappropriate content, or malware - through new machine learning models and techniques," Google further explained.
Aside from identifying malicious apps, Google also devised a scheme so it could immediately identify developers who have repeatedly violated Google Play policies and ban them from the platform.
According to the company's report, it was able to take down up to 100,000 "bad developers" last year on top of the crunched numbers of removed apps. Google was also confident that their model of identifying Google Play policy violators "made it more difficult for bad actors to create new accounts and attempt to publish yet another set of bad apps."
The types of malicious apps and those with abusive contents vary. For example, Google identified several apps they called Copycats that posed as legitimate, popular apps by "using confusable unicode characters" or through logos that looked very similar to the real ones. Google said Copycats composed most of the taken down apps and equalled to more than 250,000.
Google combined machine learning models and human reviewers to flag down malicious applications and subsequently review them if they had inappropriate contents like pornography, hate messages, violence, and illegal activities.
Another identified group of bad apps are those that belong to Potentially Harmful Applications. These are generally the ones that are the most scary and pose severe threats as they contain malware and viruses that can lead to cybersecurity issues such as phishing activities, the spread of trojans, and identity or information theft.
