You don’t know but there are can be many chances that you might have downloaded an Android application that may contain a virus or malware, and you should definitely get them uninstalled from your phone.
No matter what anyone says, Google Play is a dump. Not for nothing, it is recognized as the most popular source of malicious software for Android. It’s just that most users trust the official Google app store and download any software from there indiscriminately. What other choice do they have? After all, they’ve always been taught that it’s much more dangerous to download APKs from the Internet. Well, that’s true. But beware of dangerous applications on Google Play at all times. At least after the fact.
The cybersecurity researchers from antivirus company McAfee found 8 malicious Android apps with multi-million downloads on Google Play that you must uninstall from your phone right now. Once on their victims’ devices, they download messages and then make online purchases on their behalf, confirming transactions with verification codes that come in the form of SMS.
List of malicious Android apps [reported in April 2021]
Basically, these are apps that are potentially highly sought after by users. Among them are keyboard skins, photo editors, ringtones applications, etc:
- com.studio.keypaper2021
- com.pip.editor.camera
- org.my.famorites.up.keypaper
- com.super.color.hairdryer
- com.celab3.app.photo.editor
- com.hit.camera.pip
- com.daynight.keyboard.wallpaper
- com.super.star.ringtones
These are the names of the application packages, that is, something like their identifiers. Since these are all malicious applications, their creators know that they will be looked for and dealt with.
So they may well be prepared to change the custom app names that you and I see. But we’re the ones who can’t track that. So it is much more reliable from this point of view to track exactly the identifiers and remove malicious software by them.
How to find a virus on Android
But after all, you will say, on smartphones software is installed with custom names. Yes, it is. Therefore, you will need a small utility that will allow you to effectively identify all the slaggy software that you have installed yourself by identifying the name of their packages.
- Download the Package Name Viewer from Google Play;
- Run it and give it the privileges it asks for;
- Search one by one for the package names listed above;
- If you find an application with those names, click on it and uninstall it.
Package Name Viewer is convenient in that it allows you not only to find the desired application by its package name but also, if necessary, to go to the settings to remove it. To do this, just click on the application icon, as you will get to the appropriate section of the system, where you can stop, disable, delete the accumulated data, revoke privileges or simply erase the unwanted program.
How to cancel the payment subscription on Android
It is best to uninstall the application exactly. This is the most effective way to protect yourself from its activity. However, it is possible that it could have signed you up for paid subscriptions, so first, check your card for unknown charges and then look at the list of active subscriptions in Google Play:
- Launch Google Play and click on your profile icon;
- In the window that opens, select the “Payments and Subscriptions” section;
- Here select “Subscriptions” and check if there are any unknown subscriptions among them;
- If there is, just click on the “Cancel” button next to it.
In principle, if the subscription was made through Google Play and the payment has already passed, you can request a refund from Google. We described how to do this in a separate article. But since the developers of such apps usually think carefully about ways to steal money, they usually do not use Google Play’s built-in payment tool so that they cannot be revoked if anything happens.