Cybercriminals are using third-party app sites to peddle reverse-engineered versions—essentially counterfeit or pirated—of almost all the most popular paid apps available on the Google Play and Apple App Stores, software firm Arxan has discovered.
The firm uncovered this parallel app universe in a similar piece of research last year and for 2013 not much appears to have changed.
Looking at a total of 230 apps—the top 100 paid apps and top 15 free apps for Android and iOS—Arxan found that 100 percent of the top paid apps on Android and 56 percent on iOS were being impersonated in a compromised form on grey markets.
For free apps, the analysis found that 73 percent of Android apps in the top 15 existed in a bogus form on third-party stores, slightly worse than the 53 percent for iOS. Arxan also looked at popular financial apps, 20 from each platform, finding that a half of the Android samples existed as hacked versions with a quarter for Android.
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