Most of the 250 antiviruses for Android are not effective (2 photos)

Providing protection for devices working underManaging the Android operating system is a priority for users. However, many unscrupulous developers slip substandard programs that harm not only the user's wallet, but also allow viruses to freely enter the system.

AV-Comparatives from Austria has severalyears of testing anti-virus applications from various developers, offered in the online store Google Play. This year, experts analyzed the performance of 250 programs designed for smartphones that have Android 8.0 (“Oreo”) and Android 6.01 (“Marshmallow”) operating systems installed. Testing was conducted by downloading a previously known malicious apk-file. Each antivirus program worked with individually allocated device. When a virus was detected, the test was counted.

As it turned out, many antiviruses are not at allthey scan downloaded and installed programs, they only check with the white and black lists, while matching the names of the packages, rather than checking their code. Other tested programs could consider themselves malware if developers forgot to add their product to the white list. In addition, some programs are generally not created by IB specialists, but, for example, by game developers.

As a result, only 80 applications out of 250 foundover 30% of malicious applications and did not have false positives. The following 138 antivirus applications detected less than 30% of malware samples or had a relatively high false alarm rate when downloading “clean files” from the Google Play Store. Another 32 applications have already been deleted from the Play Store over the past two months, since they had nothing to do with protecting the device.

Successfully passed testing products knownbrands: AVG, Kaspersky Lab, McAfee, Symantec, ESET, AhnLab, Avast, Avira, Dr.Web, Tencent, Bitdefender, F-Secure, G-Data, Sophos, Trend Micro and Trustwave. Basically, only their products were able to recognize 100% of the threats (a total of 23 applications out of 250).

Source: av-comparatives.org