Download Samsung’s Galaxy Store Distributing Malware-laden Android Apps for free
Aside from the Google Play Store, which houses hundreds of thousands of Android apps, there are several other third-party app stores where users can find Android apps and Samsung’s Galaxy Store is one such place. Though it’s not as popular as Google’s app store and a recent report gives us even more reasons not to like it. It has been revealed that the Galaxy Store currently hosts and distributes several apps that could potentially infect a user’s device with malware.
The report comes from Android Polices Max Weinbach, who recently took to Twitter to share his experience downloading Showbox-based apps from the Galaxy Store. Weinbach suggested that downloading the apps triggers a Google Play Protect warning, indicating that they could infect users’ devices with malware.
Following the discovery, the affected Galaxy Store apps were further investigated for Virus Total. An analysis of the APKs of the suspicious apps revealed several low quality alerts like riskware, adware, and more. In addition, the analysis found that some apps also request unnecessary permissions, including access to call logs, contact, and phone functionality.
The Galaxy Store apps have been further investigated by an Android security analyst known as linuxct and it was revealed that the apps contain ad technology that can run dynamic code. This means that while the apps may not be infected with malware, they may download and run other code that may contain malware-laden programs on users’ devices.
It is further revealed that these apps are clones of the ShowBox app and thus can distribute illegal content to users. The app subreddit supports this, stating that it has been in a non-operational state for the past two years and that other Showbox apps found in digital markets are “fake”. One thing to note is that these apps cannot be found in the Google Play Store.
Therefore, it is imperative that users do not download these apps from Galaxy Store to protect their privacy. Samsung has yet to comment on this situation and find a possible solution to it. We’ll keep you posted on this, so stay tuned. In the meantime, try downloading apps from the more reliable Google Play Store!
