After a blog post by cybersecurity company Sophos, tech giant Google has removed 22 potentially dangerous apps from play store. These android apps had a "device-draining backdoor" and posed as as Apple apps to the advertisers in order to earn more from them.
This practice is commonly known as click fraud and is done to extract extra money from advertisers who mistakenly believe they have reached deep-pocket users (iPhone users in this instance).
The "device-draining backdoor" on these apps, which we mentioned earlier, enabled the attacker to take control of the user's phone data without their knowledge.
One of these apps 'Sparkle FlashLight' had been downloaded more than a million times.
What is click fraud?
It is the practice of repeatedly clicking on an advertisement hosted on a website with the intention of generating revenue for the host website or draining revenue from the advertiser. This practice is a crime as every click costs to the advertisers. Often a computer generated program is used to click on the ads flashing on the apps. This gives the apps liberty to charge the advertiser more per click.
The list of apps removed from playstore: