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Our Smart Phones Have an “Inside Man” That Secretly Send Our Data to Tracking Sites

There are two big application markets for our smartphones, the first one is Apple’s AppStore in which apps checked by the company before letting them downloaded by the users.

Rachel Kowalski
Rachel KowalskiCybersecurity Analyst
1 min read
Our Smart Phones Have an “Inside Man” That Secretly Send Our Data to Tracking Sites

There are two big application markets for our smartphones, the first one is Apple’s AppStore in which apps checked by the company before letting them downloaded by the users. And the second one is Google Playstore, which is more vulnareble. Google only denies those are obviously will harm the smartphone, but still you can download some apps from third party websites. Some apps lock your Android phone and ask money for unlocking it.

READ ALSO: Spotify Hit With $150 Million Copyright Suit
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So a team from Eurecom in France come up with an automated way to check the apps and monitor the websites that they try to connect. And the team found out an extraordinary scale of connection attempts. They used a Samsung Galaxy SIII that running Android version 4.1.2, and downloaded over 2000 free app from 25 different categories from Google Playstore. They recorded every attempted to connect. And they compared the URLs that these apps try to connect, to the list that prepared for the AdBlock Plus projects.
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The result were shocking, the apps connect 250,000 different URLs across almost 2,000 different top-level websites. Even some apps that don’t require a connection try to connect almost 2000 different URLs. The App called, ” Music Volume EQ ” just for controlling the volume. The team say; about 10 percent of those apps they tested, try to connect to more than 500 different websites. Nine out of 10 of these domains run by Google. And more than 70 percent did not attempt to connect any user tracking sites. Also, some of them try to connect to sites that look like harmful for the smartphones. There not much you can do for avoiding this issue. You can use AdBlockers and don’t download apps from third party websites.
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Original Article: MIT News
Another Source: arxiv.org
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Rachel Kowalski

Rachel Kowalski

Cybersecurity Analyst

Rachel Kowalski is the Cybersecurity Analyst at TrendinTech, where she covers vulnerabilities, ransomware, supply chain attacks, nation-state operations and the security rules shaping organizations in the United States and Europe. Before moving into journalism she worked as a threat intelligence analyst at a security vendor and later reported for CyberScoop and the security desk at Wired, covering the SolarWinds compromise and the ransomware wave that hit hospitals and pipelines. Rachel holds a Master of Science in Cybersecurity from the Georgia Institute of Technology and attends Black Hat and DEF CON in Las Vegas each year, where she follows research from the security community. She writes to make risks and countermeasures understandable to people who are not specialists.

All stories by Rachel Kowalski (214)