Avast Blog_Security News: Avast app earns top marks, 138 others called out as decepti

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Avast earned 100%, but these 138 other security apps are considered “risky.”

Does your smartphone need an antivirus app? The answer is absolutely yes, and the truth of the matter is that there are a multitude from which to choose. As an aid to consumers, independent testing lab AV-Comparatives periodically assesses security software to evaluate its effectiveness. The lab did such a study recently on Android antivirus products and learned that over half of those tested were “risky,” meaning they were at best buggy and at worst deceptive. Avast, however, received a perfect score of 100% malware detection.

Our malware detection secret weapon is not so secret, as we’ve now opened it up to the entire security community. Our mobile threat intelligence platform (MTIP) is apklab.io, a tool that analyzes and classifies every type of Android malware. Recent apklab.io discoveries include malware-infected beauty apps and block puzzle games, all available on the Google Play Store until we flagged them as malicious and Google took them down.

The AV-Comparatives study looked at 250 security apps, concluding that at least 55% were dubious and unsafe to the consumer. Check the lists below to see if you may have unwittingly downloaded and installed any of them.

Possibly due to the glamour of having a security app in their portfolio, bad developers (or extremely amateur ones) have released imitation apps to mislead users and pose as competent security companies. In some cases, they are not deliberately deceptive, but are ineffective at protecting the device against malware. “Apps made by amateurs can often be spotted in the Google Play Store by looking at the options for contacting the authors,” advises AV-Comparatives in their report. “Typically, hobby developers will not provide a website address, merely an email address. Additionally, most such apps do not provide any sort of privacy policy.”

The good guys

In this test, our Avast Mobile Security & Antivirus earned a perfect score, detecting 100% of the 2,000 samples of malware used, all gathered from the most common malicious Android apps of 2018. To test for false positives, the lab also included 100 clean apps. Avast made no detection errors in the course of the study — zero false positives. Our threat detection network effectively discerns safe from unsafe.

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