these 16 malware apps are draining your battery undetected
A total of 16 apps containing malware have been removed from the Play Store. It is so-called clicker malware that secretly taps ads to generate revenue for the hackers. The apps have been downloaded more than 20 million times.
Clicker malware
McAfee’s security researchers say they discovered 16 rogue apps containing clicker malware in the Play Store. The malware was hidden in very popular apps, the most famous of which is DxClean which has over 5 million downloads. Google has been notified and the apps are no longer available in the Play Store, although they may still be active on your phone.
Clicker malware is made to tap ads all the time without a user’s knowledge. This can affect your mobile data usage and your phone’s battery will also run out faster. As usual, the malware was hidden in seemingly harmless apps, which otherwise did what they promised in the Play Store description.
Do you recognize these apps?
Now it is best to check if one of these apps is not installed on your phone. You can check that with the Package Name Viewer 2.0 app. We share the package names of the malicious apps at the bottom of this article and with Package Name Viewer 2.0 you can check whether the app is on your smartphone. We do not use the normal names of the apps as they can be misleading.
We recently wrote on Androidworld about the best antivirus apps for your phone. McAfee nicely mentions in his blog post that his Android app can detect these kinds of threats. Do you have one of the apps below on your smartphone? Let us know in the comments.
All discovered malware apps:
- com.hantor.CozyCamera
- com.james.SmartTaskManager
- kr.caramel.flash_plus
- com.smh.memocalendar
- com.joysoft.wordBook
- com.kmshack.BusanBus
- com.candlencom.candleprotest
- com.movinapp.quicknote
- com.smartwho.SmartCurrencyConverter
- com.joysoft.barcode
- com.joysoft.ezdica
- com.schedulezero.instapp
- com.meek.tingboard
- com.candlencom.flashlite
- com.doubleline.calcul
- com.dev.imagevault
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