Google just took down 224 malicious apps with 38 million installs from the Play Store

Bad apps can be hiding in the place you least expect and that’s exactly what happened with 224 malicious apps that were recently removed from the Google Play Store following the discovery of a massive ad fraud campaign.

As reported by BleepingComputer, the campaign itself was discovered by Human’s Satori Threat Intelligence team which revealed in a new report that these apps had over 38 million downloads in total. However, it was the advanced tricks and obfuscation techniques they used to bypass Google’s defenses that really stood out.

Unlike previous ad fraud campaigns, this one spanned across the globe with users of the best Android phones downloading them from 228 countries, though they generated the most ad impressions in the U.S. (30%), India (10%) and Brazil (7%). Human’s security