However it seems that recently it has been discovered that some app developers have been rather cunning by incorporating invisible ads. This isn’t your normal annoying pop-up ad rate on a browser. “What we found is that apps can also serve an illicit objective, harming both advertisers and consumers”.
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The study, which was released on Thursday by fraud detection firm Forensiq, showed that these apps can launch a number of battery intensive operations in the phone’s background which continue to run even after you exit the app. Despite the vetting process for apps places like Apple’s App Store and Google Play, offending apps can still slip through the cracks.
Lookout, a security firm focused on mobile threats, says that most of the growth in mobile malwarein the U.S.is coming from so-called ransomware, where criminals commandeer a phone and then demand money to unlock it. Why am I going to do ad monetizationwhen I can have somethingpopup and say Im not going tounlockyour device unless you give me $200, says Michael Bentley, Lookouts head ofresearch and response.The payoff per phone is just so low. Such behavior also has a marked impact on a device’s battery life.
The company’s chief scientist, Mike Andrews, told Mashable that they “wanted to show the public how blatant and obvious and hurtful all this fraud is – not just to advertisers who pay for ads that no one sees but also people using these apps on these tiny devices that are bandwidth-limited and power-limited”.
According to a video created by the team to visualize how the apps were working, advertisers like Nike and Unilever, as well as many others were being defrauded. It can be hard for advertisers to know their ads are running on malware because the apps also spoof user behaviour and send back legit-looking data.
Over the course of the 10-day study, 1% of all devices observed in the U.S. ran at least one app committing this kind of fraud; in Europe and Asia, 2-3% of devices encountered fake ads. Marketers lose customers and market share, app users burn through data because the bogus ads still burn up as much as two gigabytes per day on a single device.
In the US alone, $20 billion is expected to be spent on mobile in-app advertising in 2015, according to eMarketer, which means the money lost to in-app fraud could pass the $1 billion mark by the end of the year. If the unwitting user agrees, the malicious software in the app is given space to work.
Most of the fraudulent apps aren’t household names or even all that popular.
What’s most surprising here is that Apple – which notoriously makes developers go through rigorous approval processes before it allows their apps to appear in the App Store – has a fraud risk that is almost as high as that of Android.
The apps on your phone may be destroying your data plan in ways you didn’t even realize. Alarm bells should start ringing if an app asks you for permission to prevent the device from sleeping, run at startup, or modify and delete content on the SD card.
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Mobile App Study by Forensiq from Forensiq on Vimeo.
