03-31-2019 , 10:39 AM
Quote:AV-Comparatives’ 2017 test of Android antivirus products was inspired by the discovery of an Android app called Virus Shield, which claimed to scan mobile devices for malware, but in fact did nothing of the sort. In reality, running the app simply showed a progress bar, supposed to represent scan progress, followed by an announcement at the end of the “scan” that the device was free of malicious apps. Worryingly, the app had been available on the Google Play Store, and thousands of users had paid money for it (although this was ultimately refunded to them by Google).
Last year’s test showed that in addition to several apps that are equally ineffective at protecting the device against malware, there are other apps that employ dubious detection mechanisms. These detect most other installed apps as potentially harmful, excluding only those with white-listed package names. With user interfaces seemingly generated from a few templates, the main purpose of these apps seems to be generating easy revenue for their developers – rather than actually protecting their users.
Including these dubious apps, we found the malware protection of almost 40% of the tested Android AV apps to be inappropriate.
To help owners of Android devices to distinguish between genuine, effective Android antivirus apps on the one hand, and dubious/ineffective ones on the other, AV-Comparatives have again tested the effectiveness of antimalware programs for Android, in the 2019 Android Test.
Tested Products
For this test, we searched for and downloaded 250 antimalware security apps by various different developers from the Google Play Store.
Quote:Conclusion
Some of the Android security products in our test blocked so few of the malware samples– in some cases literally none – that they cannot reasonably be described as anti-malware apps. Compared to last year, we found even more apps using only black/whitelists as a detection mechanism. In fact, even though we tested 46 additional apps this year, the number of apps which we consider “usable” has stayed the same. 55% of the tested apps offered insufficient malware protection. Furthermore, we also found 16 apps that have not been migrated to Android 8 properly, decreasing their protection capabilities on newer Android versions.
23 of the products we tested detected 100% of the malware samples; considering that the most common malicious Android apps of 2018 were used, this is what they should do. Most of the vendors that usually take part in independent tests score highly, as their products are regularly scrutinised, and they actively develop them to ensure they are effective.
Read the full article HERE