Google Removes 24 ‘Dangerous’ Malware-Filled Apps From its Play Store

Zainab SaeedLast Updated: Feb 10, 2020

Google seems so active to curb the emerging issue of malware-filled apps and this is the reason that the company has removed 24 malware-filled apps from its Play Store. These apps were harvesting data and sending back to the Chinese servers.

All these apps were belong to a single Chinese parent company. The company was using multiple developer accounts in order to distribute them in Google’s app market. VPN Pro pointed out these apps while it was looking for the various permissions that anti-virus apps ask Android users.

Google Removes 24 ‘Dangerous’ Malware-Filled Apps From its Play Store

VPN Pro has mentioned in their blog post that a Chinese company known as Shenzhen HAWK was offering almost 24 apps via Google Play Store with 382 million cumulative downloads. All these apps were asking for dangerous permissions. Moreover, some of these apps were also containing malware and rogueware. Rogueware apps were pretending like if it has detect and fix problems. These apps were trying to convince the users to pay money or to add more malware. It is important to mention here that Shenzhen HAWK is a subsidiary of TCL Corporation.

Shenzhen HAWK was offering different apps which include Sound Recorder with over 100 million downloads, Weather Forecast with over 10 million downloads, File Manager with 50 million downloads, Super Cleaner with over 100 million downloads, as well as Virus Cleaner 2019 with over 100 million downloads.

Let us share the apps with you in case you have also installed any of them on your device. All these apps are given below in the list.