{"id":512564,"date":"2023-10-25T16:40:26","date_gmt":"2023-10-25T14:40:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=512564"},"modified":"2023-10-25T16:43:55","modified_gmt":"2023-10-25T14:43:55","slug":"google-flagged-samsung-apps-as-spyware","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/security\/512564-google-flagged-samsung-apps-as-spyware.html","title":{"rendered":"Google flagged Samsung apps as spyware"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google’s Play Protect security service for Android smartphones incorrectly flagged two popular Samsung apps as harmful last week, 9to5Google reports<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The issue was first flagged<\/strong><\/a> by users of the Google Support forum, who posted screenshots of a notification from the Play Protect service informing users that the Samsung Wallet and Samsung Messages apps were harmful.<\/p>\n

Both these apps come pre-installed with Samsung smartphones.<\/p>\n

Samsung Wallet is the successor to Samsung Pay and is a legitimate digital payment service that allows users to link their bank cards to their phones or smartwatches and make tap payments with the relevant account.<\/p>\n

However, Play Protect said the app tried to spy on users’ data, including SMS messages, photos, audio recordings, and call history.<\/p>\n

That would qualify it as spyware, a form of malware used for surveillance without a user’s permission.<\/p>\n

The notification advised users to uninstall or disable the apps, as shown in the screenshot below.<\/p>\n

A moderator on the Samsung Community Forum posted a response<\/strong><\/a> to the issue, explaining it was caused by a “temporary failure of the Google server” and was resolved.<\/p>\n

Those affected by the bug can reinstall the app or go to their app settings to re-enable it.<\/p>\n

Google did not provide an official response acknowledging the apparent glitch or its cause from its end.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Recent Play Protect improvements<\/h2>\n

Google recently announced a major improvement<\/strong><\/a> for the Play Protect service \u2014 the ability to scan sideloaded apps for malicious code before they are installed on a user’s device.<\/p>\n

The service already scans about 125 billion apps daily to help protect users from malware and other harmful software.<\/p>\n

It can take various actions when it detects a potentially harmful app \u2014 including sending the user a warning, preventing an app install, or automatically disabling the app.<\/p>\n

Play Protect previously conducted real-time checks and warned users when it identified a sideloaded app known to be malicious from existing scanning intelligence or on-device machine learning, similarity comparisons, and other techniques.<\/p>\n

With the latest update, Play Protect can perform a real-time scan at the code level, further reducing the likelihood of Android smartphones getting infected with malware.<\/p>\n

\n

Now read: Cyberattackers put malware on blockchain to stop removal<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Google’s Play Protect malware scanning service for Android incorrectly flagged Samsung Wallet and Samsung Messages as harmful apps last week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341042,"featured_media":464541,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[397,167,10100,801,90272,645,90274,81963,18564],"class_list":["post-512564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-security","tag-android","tag-google","tag-google-play","tag-malware","tag-play-protect","tag-samsung","tag-samsung-messages","tag-samsung-wallet","tag-spyware"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512564"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341042"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=512564"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512564\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":512640,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/512564\/revisions\/512640"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/464541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=512564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=512564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=512564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}