Malicious Apps in the Android Market :: The Future of the Internet

Malicious Apps in the Android Market

January 11th, 2010 | by elisabeth | Published in Future of the Internet | 2 Comments

As we knew would happen sooner or later, a dangerous malicious app has apparently made its way into Android’s Market. The app is said to “create[] a shell of mobile banking apps” and collect users’ personal information. It’s been removed; no word on how many users, if any, were actually affected.

Offhand, I can’t think of an app with comparable problems that has gotten into iPhone’s app store. What will be really interesting about this incident, and the similar ones that are sure to follow, is how users and vendors react. I can imagine this creating hysterical urging for Google to pre-screen all Android apps the way Apple does, but I think that would be premature. Yes, an open Market(s) is going to have more questionable apps, but there are many solutions other than lockdown—a strong user ranking for apps (which already exists), a way to alert people who have already downloaded the app, sandboxing (which admittedly wouldn’t have mattered here), or a quick way to freeze the app while complaints are investigating. They’re only partial solutions, but lockdown is only partial, too.

Now that the Android OS is really starting to take off, this story is going to be repeated, and we’ll get to see how strongly committed Google is to the principles it built the OS on — and whether there are models out there for vetting third party code that do better than those of the generative PC, but aren’t as restrictive as that of the iPhone.

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer

Update: eWeek reports that Google has removed a number of suspicious apps from its marketplace. Of course, the more generative structure of the Android market means that “banned” apps can be obtained elsewhere — unlike the iPhone app monopoly enjoyed by Apple, where the iPhone App store is the only point of distribution. –JZ

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Bertil Hatt says:

January 11th, 2010 at 9:05 pm (#)

What really upsets me about all that is that the future of an Opened Mobile App ecology depends on journalists having something to say or being bored the day someone looses money in this kind of scam, and whether that person is cute-for-TV or not… Let’s hope that Google’s spam- & phising-detection algos will save us from this long enough for people to adopt the tech.
Nick Taylor says:

January 12th, 2010 at 4:45 am (#)

This comes with the terrain – but the alternative is corporate ownership of the root… which is worse.

Remember the Palladium scare back in the 00s? When Microsoft was going to build its DRM in at the hardware level so you’d have to ask MS for permission to run anything?

Remember the Sony rootkit fiasco… where Sony attempted to infect its customers PCs with a virus taking control of the root when they played a Sony CD?

Well Apple have built this functionality in. They’ve taken something that was too evil for even Microsoft to get away with, and they’ve copied it.

So um… I’ll live with the risk of rogue apps. Any day.

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About Jonathan Zittrain

Jonathan Zittrain is Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School

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