Android users should uninstall these 36 fraudulent beauty apps, researchers warn

Sign up to our free weekly IndyTech newsletter delivered straight to your inbox Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Researchers from WhiteOps found fraudulent code in a number of beauty camera applications, with names such as “Yoroko Camera,” “Beauty Collage Lite,” and “Rose Photo Editor & Selfie Beauty Camera”. Many of these apps can be identified by a large number of installations in a short space of time, and a large amount of 5-star and 1-star ratings, resulting in a “U-shaped distribution.” Altogether, these apps were downloaded more than 20 million times, 565,833 per app on average. “A batch of 15 apps, all published after September 2019, had a much slower removal rate using those new techniques.” The group behind the apps attempted to change code in their apps to avoid detection, in a possible attempt to pinpoint the criteria used by Google for removing apps from the Play Store. They also used Arabic characters from the Quran to obfuscate the code, which “substantially reduces readability for people not familiar with Arabic, confuses researchers as to where bad actors are based, breaks analysis tools/functionalities since several do not support unicode characters” the researchers said.