Despite the fact that there are no viruses under Android and as a class did not exist in principle, there are more than enough malicious applications for this platform. They even manage to penetrate Google Play, terrifying users and forcing them to turn to anti-virus programs. True, as the experts of the antivirus company Avast found out, all the harm that the overwhelming majority of them carry in themselves is reduced solely to the demonstration of intrusive ads, but not to surveillance and theft of confidential information.
Most malware for Android is adware
According to a report by Avast, 72% of all malicious applications are adware, which is also called adware or in the professional slang 'advar', while the rest are banking Trojans, spyware, and others. In most cases, their purpose is to display advertisements. The more widespread an adware application is and the more people saw the ads it shows, the more money their creators made. Despite this, all applications of this type achieve their goal in different ways.
What are the types of malicious applications
Adware applications are annoying but generally not dangerous
- The first type includes applications that display ads in the background. For this, a potential victim does not even need to see them, the application just does not fall asleep when the user leaves it, but continues to spin ads. The only negative consequence of this approach is premature battery discharge, which can occur 20, 30 and even 50% faster than usual.
- The second type is the so-called invasive applications. They inject ad scripts into the smartphone interface, which is why banner ads appear even where they shouldn't be in theory: in the notification curtain, on the desktop, on the lock screen, in the Settings app.
- The third type is clicker programs, which are engaged in clicking on banner ads on specially designated sites and web services. By their purpose, they are quite close to the first type, differing from them only in that they themselves, as a rule, do not show advertisements, but at the same time they quite effectively “eat” the charge and seriously undermine the autonomy.
The most annoying type of adware for my taste is invasive apps because the effect of their activity is visible to the naked eye. But both those, and others, and the third, as a rule, users install themselves and voluntarily. In most cases, people either do not read reviews if they download software from Google Play, which can usually be used to identify malware, or they do something that I strongly advise against doing – namely, downloading programs from the Internet in the form of APK files. This further increases the risk of infection, but whatever type of adware you encounter, you can get rid of all of them.
How to remove ads from Android – smartphone
- The first thing I recommend doing is uninstalling the adware you've already figured out. This method is generally best suited for Type 1 and Type 2 applications.
- If that doesn't help, boot your smartphone in Safe Mode (our malware expert Vladimir Kuznetsov explained how to do this in detail), and then try uninstalling ad apps or their components again.
- As a last resort – usually it doesn't come to that – there are dedicated DNS ad blockers. They don't just identify banners and hide them, leaving free space where the ad was, but they act much deeper. They analyze all incoming and outgoing traffic, find advertising in it and prevent its passage. As a result, you will not see ads anywhere else.
It is my sincere position that the problem of malicious applications is greatly exaggerated. After all, a smartphone infection is very similar to a plane crash that never happens for one reason. Here, too, several factors should coincide at once: your own carelessness when downloading software from Google Play or even more so because of its limits, your negligence when distributing privileges, since applications immediately after installation are severely limited in their capabilities, and, of course, unwillingness to learn self-defense , although it is utterly simple.