The Google Play Store has often been criticized for the ease with which unscrupulous developers manage to publish dangerous apps, but apparently it is by no means the only store with problems of this type. Within the Galaxy Store, the app store dedicated to Samsung Galaxy phones, there are in fact numerous dangerous apps available to users.
This was discovered by Max Weinbach, a contributor to the Android Police online newspaper, who believes that these apps are real malware, computer viruses that can infect Samsung phones shortly after installing the software. The analysis of the apps in question with numerous antiviruses, such as Avast, Avira, Eset, Kaspersky and Virustotal, confirmed the presence of a lot of dangerous code inside each of these applications. But that's not all: the apps ask the user for a large amount of useless permissions, a clear symptom that they were written to collect phone usage and online browsing data for advertising purposes.
Dangerous apps on the Galaxy Store: what are they
Weinbach has not published a list of the dangerous applications it has found on the Galaxy Store, limiting itself to communicating that it has found at least 5 of them and that they are all clones of a very famous app until a few years ago: Showbox.
Showbox is an app, unusable for about two years, which allowed you to watch thousands of movies and TV series episodes without paying and, for this, it has been accused several times of promoting piracy and has been blocked.
All apps on the Galaxy Store with the name "Showbox Free" or a similar name are likely to be dangerous and, in any case, given the app they imitate, are of dubious legitimacy.
Why Showbox clones are dangerous
The problems associated with these apps are mainly two: the first is indiscriminate access to user data, by requesting unnecessary permissions, which is a clear symptom of a collection of data (which will then be resold to the highest bidder); the second is that they are able to download other code from external servers and run it on the smartphone.
This means that the app, even if it appears harmless, can download spyware, trojan or malware of any kind immediately after installation.
Weinbach also specifies that some of the apps in question are recognized as dangerous by the antivirus integrated into Play Protect, the protection system against dangerous apps integrated into the Android operating system. However, the user is still allowed to install them at his own risk.
Which it obviously shouldn't do at all.