Smartphone Security: Delete These Apps

Smartphone owners have been urged to remove certain apps that could be spying on their activity.

Some of the most popular apps you love and have come to rely on could be posing more of a danger than they're worth. Here's what you need to know. ...some of those apps that you love and have come to rely on could actually be putting you at risk... We’ve (Reader's Digest) collected information about some of the worst offenders so that you can make an educated decision about which apps you trust with your privacy and which ones need to go...

CamScanner
Ana Bera is a cybersecurity expert with Safe at Last. She identified CamScanner, an app meant to imitate a scanner with your phone, as one of the apps consumers should be concerned about. “Cybersecurity experts have found a malicious component installed in the app that acts as a Trojan Downloader and keeps collecting infected files,” she explains. “This kind of app can seriously damage your phone and should be de-installed instantly. Luckily, once you remove it from your phone, it is highly unlikely that it will continue harming you.”

Weather apps
“Check your weather app,” says Shayne Sherman, CEO of TechLoris. “There have been several different weather apps out there that have been laced with Trojans or other malwares.” While the most benign of these claims to take your information purely for weather accuracy, he calls that questionable. “Watch your local forecast instead, and if you have Good Weather, delete it now,” he advises. “That one is especially dangerous.”

Facebook
Look, we all love our social networking apps. But cybersecurity expert Raffi Jafari, cofounder and creative director of Caveni Digital Solutions, says, “If you are looking for apps to delete to protect your information, the absolute worst culprit is Facebook. The sheer scale of their data collection is staggering, and it is often more intrusive than companies like Google. If you had to pick one app to remove to protect your data, it would be Facebook.”

WhatsApp
“This is a call to action for users who may be living under a rock and unaware of the vulnerabilities that were disclosed earlier this year,” says Michael Covington, VP of Product for mobile security leader Wandera. “The vulnerabilities with WhatsApp—both iOS and Android versions—allowed attackers to target users by simply sending a specially crafted message to their phone number. Once successfully exploited, the attackers would be granted access to the same things WhatsApp had access to, including the microphone, the camera, the contact list, and more.”

Instagram
Whatsapp and Instagram are both owned by Facebook, which is part of what makes them all a risk. Dave Salisbury, director of the University of Dayton Center for Cybersecurity and Data Intelligence, says that Instagram “requests several permissions that include but are not limited to modifying and reading contacts and the contents of your storage, locating your phone, reading your call log, modifying system settings, and having full network access.” Plus Nine More