Trend Micro: One in ten Google Play Store apps is malware

Trend Micro has been analysing Android apps and their results are rather shocking.

They dissected apps from both the official Google Play app store and outside 3rd party stores, and found nearly 1/4 of the Android apps in total hosted malware, while nearly 70,000 Google Play apps were also malicious.

Trend Micro’s Rik Ferguson notes the results are hard to believe.

"There is a distinct scepticism paired with a strong belief that the security industry may be selling a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, or if it does then it only exists in far off countries and little used app stores."

The results are however backed by F-Secure, who found 79 percent of all mobile malware detected in 2012 targeted Android, up by 13% from 2011.

Trend Micro notes due to the open nature of applications in Android it was virtually impossible to protect against malware completely, and with a huge percentage of Android phones still on Gingerbread, a large pool of very vulnerable smartphone users remain despite updated protection in the latest versions.

They also noted that Windows Phone was a much smaller target to malware writers, and also more secure in general than Android, meaning their users had little to worry about.

Read much more detail at Stockhouse.com here.