Did you download these 15 apps on your smartphone? Alert! Know how you are deceived

As many as 15 apps have been identified as Adware on Google Play Store by a global security research firm. Unfortunately, those who have downloaded them, are facing a tough situation. It is claimed that these apps are engaging in generating frequent, large, and intrusive ads. Notably, these app icons are hidden in a stealthy manner while some are even disguised to make it difficult for users to find and remove them, security researchers at global cyber security major Sophos said on Wednesday. The problem is not restricted to a few people, in fact, it has affected the devices of a humongous number of people as many as 1.3 billion plus devices worldwide have installed at least one of these apps!

"SophosLabs recently discovered 15 apps on Google's Play Market that engage in such practices; They generate frequent, large, intrusive ads and literally hide their app icons in the launcher in order to make it difficult for you to find and remove them. Several of them go a step further by disguising themselves in the phone's App settings page," said threat researcher Pankaj Kohli in a Sophos blog post.

When opened, these apps say that they are incompatible with your device, misguiding the users that it has crashed.

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"When first launched, the app displays a message that says 'This app is incompatible with your device!' You might think that the app has crashed, because, after this 'crash,' the app opens the Play Store and navigates to the page for Google Maps, to mislead you into thinking that the ubiquitous Maps app is the cause of the problem," the firm added.

"It is not. This is a ruse," Andrew Brandt, Principal Researcher, SophosLabs, said in a statement. Also, these apps allegedly hide their own icons so they do not show up in the launcher's app tray. Out of the 15 apps, at least nine use deceptive application icons and names, most of which appeared to have been chosen because they might plausibly resemble an innocuous system app.