Take matters into your own hands and delete these malicious new Android apps before Google

by techlowdown · 6 June 2023

Remember that latest Android security threat concerning a large group of malicious apps left unattended by Google in its Play Store to wreak havoc upon millions of users around the world? No, we’re not talking about the one discovered just a little over a couple of weeks ago. Or the one from less than a couple of weeks prior to that. Or the one from a week before that.

Dubbed SpinOk by the firm’s cybersecurity experts, the spyware module attached to those shockingly popular apps is even more widespread than initially shown. Believe it or not, another company that claims to “predict cyber threats” has found an additional 193 (!!!) apps capable of snooping on their users, although for what it’s worth, this malicious conglomerate is thought to have amassed “just” around 30 million installations… so far.

These are two of the most popular new Android apps found to be spying on their unsuspecting users.

The bigger problem is perhaps that a number of these newly surfaced spyware-injecting apps have yet to be deleted from Google Play, so the victim count could still rise. It’s unclear exactly why Google is not taking faster and more decisive action against all of these apps, leaving some of the most popular titles on the list below available for new downloads, but whether or not the search giant will do the right thing (eventually), you need to uninstall the following from your phones ASAP:

If you missed last week’s mobile security alert, you should know that SpinOk is among the most insidious types of malware discovered of late, infiltrating your Android phones through marketing SDKs (software development kits) that even app developers might confuse as innocuous.

The end goal, however, is often to gather personal data and files from unsuspecting users and transfer all that to remote servers for various shady purposes. Under no circumstance you should keep any of the apps listed above installed on your mobile device, even if you have reason to believe developers have removed the spying code via recent updates. After all, you know what they say about people who are fooled twice by the same wrongdoer.