Google on Monday revealed that nearly 200,000 app submissions to its Play Retailer for Android had been both rejected or remediated to handle points with entry to delicate knowledge reminiscent of location or SMS messages over the previous yr.
The tech big additionally stated it blocked 333,000 dangerous accounts from the app storefront in 2023 for making an attempt to distribute malware or for repeated coverage violations.
“In 2023, we prevented 2.28 million policy-violating apps from being printed on Google Play partly due to our funding in new and improved safety features, coverage updates, and superior machine studying and app evaluate processes,” Google’s Steve Kafka, Khawaja Shams, and Mohet Saxena stated.
“To assist safeguard consumer privateness at scale, we partnered with SDK suppliers to restrict delicate knowledge entry and sharing, enhancing the privateness posture for over 31 SDKs impacting 790K+ apps.”
As compared, Google fended off 1.43 million dangerous apps from being printed to the Play Retailer in 2022, alongside banning 173,000 dangerous accounts over the identical time interval.
As well as, the Mountain View-based agency stated it strengthened its developer onboarding and evaluate processes, requiring them to furnish extra id info and full a verification course of when establishing their Play Console developer accounts.
This, the corporate famous, allows it to higher perceive the developer group and root out dangerous actors from gaming the system to propagate malicious apps.
The event comes as Google is taking a collection of steps to safe the Android ecosystem. Final November, it moved the App Protection Alliance (ADA), which it launched in November 2019, below the Linux Basis umbrella, with Meta and Microsoft becoming a member of because the founding steering members.
Across the similar time, the corporate additionally rolled out real-time scanning on the code degree to sort out novel Android malware and an “Impartial safety evaluate” badge within the Play Retailer’s Information security part for VPN apps which have undergone a Cell Software Safety Evaluation (MASA) audit.
On the user-facing facet of issues, Google has additionally taken the step of taking down roughly 1.5 million purposes from the Play Retailer that don’t goal the newest APIs.
Google’s ongoing combat to sort out malicious actors on Android coincides with a lawsuit filed by the corporate within the U.S. in opposition to two China-based fraudsters who’re alleged to have engaged in a world on-line client funding fraud scheme and tricked customers into downloading faux apps from the Play Retailer and different sources and in the end stealing their funds.
