‘Malware‘ is the most common issue that every industry reports. But it’s not that simple in terms of loss it generates!

Irrespective of the size, malware attacks are among the top security risks for most companies.

Google says it has blocked 1.9 billion Android malware installations from non-play sources in 2019.

The search engine giant revealed this in an Android Developers blog on February 11, 2020, where it said it has successfully scanned billions of malware installations through the ‘Play Protect’ feature.

As built-in malware protection for Android devices, Play protect now scans 100 billion apps per day and uses the results to keep the users informed about the possible threats and ways to secure devices.

In May 2019, the search engine giant also worked with developers to eliminate tens of thousands of play store apps that violated Google data policies.

 “Our improved vetting mechanisms stopped over 790,000 policy-violating app submissions before they were ever published to the Play Store,” says Google.

Earlier in 2018, Google had rolled out a policy restricting apps from gaining unnecessary access to Android devices’ SMS and call logs.

After this, various developers collaborated with Google to develop a robust system that could cut down 98 percent drop in apps accessing user data and logs.

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As part of its anti-threat measures for 2020 and beyond, Google stands committed to:

• Strengthening app safety policies to protect user privacy
• Faster detection of bad actors and blocking repeat offenders
• Detecting and removing apps with harmful content and behaviors

Do you know? Malware attacks caused a whopping USD 2.61 million in additional costs to organizations in 2018, with more than 25% of them targeted at banking and financial services.

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