Researchers at popular cybersecurity firm Avast have claimed that they have discovered “a large campaign of HiddenAds” on the Google Play store. ‘HiddenAds’ is essentially a family of Trojans that disguise as useful and authentic applications, but eventually work towards serving intrusive ads to the users. In case your device has suddenly started spamming you with ads and you do not know the root cause of this behaviour, you might have installed one of these apps on your device. Notably, as these apps eventually hide themselves, you most likely won’t even remember that you had them on your phone. Before we go into detail, just check if your phone as any of these 19 apps on your phone, which have been highlighted by Avast as ‘HiddenAds’ and remove them as soon as possible:
| APP NAME | DOWNLOADS |
| Draw Color by Number | 1,000,000 |
| Skate Board | 1,000,000 |
| Find Hidden Differences | 1,000,000 |
| Shoot Master | 1,000,000 |
| Spot Hidden Differences | 500,000 |
| Dancing Run – Color Ball Run | 500,000 |
| Find 5 Differences | 500,000 |
| Joy Woodworker | 500,000 |
| Throw Master | 500,000 |
| Throw into Space | 500,000 |
| Divide it – Cut & Slice Game | 500,000 |
| Tony Shoot | 500,000 |
| Assassin Legend | 500,000 |
| Stealing Run | 500,000 |
| Fly Skater 2020 | 500,000 |
| Disc Go！ | 500,000 |
“Based on the conducted research, it appears the campaign initially mainly targeted users in India and South East Asia. The apps likely spread through game ads focused in these regions. Due to the generic developer details and Terms of Service, the developers of the HiddenAds campaign remain unknown,” Avast said in its blog post.
While these apps have been removed from Google Play store, users who installed these apps earlier might still have them installed on their phone. As these apps tend to hide themselves, we would recommend you to search for these apps actively and remove them from your phone as soon as possible.
If we go by the percentage share, 21 percent of the affected devices were found to be from Brazil while 8.1 percent from India. These were the two most affected countries due to these apps. Considering that these apps have the capability of displaying ads outside their own app is itself extremely alarming and puts them in the category of adware.
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