Chinese app developer, DU Group is exposed to abuse of licenses and advertising fraud

BuzzFeedNews reported that it found that many popular Android apps had abuse permissions and advertising fraud. These apps have a total of more than 90 million downloads in Google’s official app store, and their developers claim to have billions of users worldwide. The developer named Du Group is actually a related company of Baidu, which was previously spun off from Baidu Group to distribute applications.

BuzzFeedNews asked security company CheckPoint to help analyze the analysis and found that some of them would fake click ads to monetize. These apps automatically load ads in the background and then automatically perform simulated clicks, while the foreground doesn’t display anything so users don’t notice an exception. Of course, performing simulations will always reside in the background to run the user’s power and traffic, and the loaded ads belong to Google and Twitter’s advertising agencies.

In addition, the analysis also pointed out that these applications collect user’s private information and pass it back to the developer’s server, but the application does not mention the corresponding content.

In fact, BuzzFeedNews analyzed more than 5,000 popular apps this time, and the number of apps and developers with similar problems is actually quite a lot. The analysis also pointed out that given that Google Play Store is the most popular app store, more and more developers are trying to spread malicious apps through the store.

After the above issues were reported to Google, Google removed six apps from the Play store that belonged to a Chinese app developer, DU Group.