Almost nine percent of popular apps
downloaded from Google Play interact
with websites that could compromise your
security and privacy, says a
study. Although apps connect to a
complicated network of websites, both to
function and generate advertising
revenues, most users do not know their
private information could compromised,
said one of the researchers Michalis
Faloutsos, professor at University of
California, Riverside in the US.
“We focused on a relatively neglected
aspect of security research, which is the
potential for good apps to leak personal
information through the sites they interact
with. A lot of people believe that if an app
is popular or available on one of the big
app stores then it must be safe, and we
suspected that wasn’t the case,” Faloutsos
said.
The researchers conducted a large-scale
analysis of URLs embedded in 13,500free
android apps downloaded from Google
Play. The apps tested were created by
reputable developers and downloaded by
many people, among them popular social
media, shopping, news and entertainment
apps. By developing and using a tool called
AURA (Android URL Risk Assessor), the
team identified more than 250,000 URLs
accessed by the 13,500 apps, which they
cross-referenced for trustworthiness using
Virus Total, a database of malicious URLs,
and Web of Trust (WOT), a popular website
rating system.
The team is now developing a tool that
allows users to evaluate the riskiness of
individual apps before downloading
them. The team will present their findings
at the IEEE GLOBECOM conference in San
Diego, US on December 8.
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