Elain Brown Tech 08.01.2022 01:Aug AM EDT

Facebook Ads are Promoting Apps That Have Adware in Them — Which Apps are These?

Facebook ads have been used as a strategy by malicious actors to employ Adware.

An anti-virus software company has recently detected a rampant surge of users downloading malware that masquerades itself as an optimization and junk cleaning phone app.

These adware apps that can be downloaded in Google Play Store do not contain or run any function in a user's phone.

What adware does to a device it has been downloaded to is push multiple amounts of advertisements as long as it possibly can.

According to BleepingComputer, the malicious applications take advantage of the Contact Provider Android component, which gives them the ability to send and receive data between the device and online services.

The apps conceal themselves on the victim's device to avoid being deleted by frequently changing their icons and names and by pretending to be either Settings or the Play Store itself.

Facebook Ads for Adware

Facebook ads are the reason why users are enticed to download these kinds of apps on their devices. Users are lured to download the apps because of the legitimate looking Facebook advertisements of these apps.

These apps also look genuine as they have well designed Facebook pages that operate looking like a real legitimate app instead of a malware app, in the page, it also has a link posted that automatically leads users to the Play Store for download.

According to McAfee, when users choose to download the app, it immediately begins running in the background as a background process and starts a malicious service.

Upon installation, adware will immediately begin running malicious services in the background without launching the actual application.

This piece of malware was discovered by the McAfee Mobile Research Team while browsing the Google Play Store.

The majority of them are masquerading as cleaner apps that delete junk files or help users optimize their batteries for better device management.

What makes these apps tricky is that they make an effort to conceal themselves so as to avoid users discovering and removing the apps from their devices.

These apps can also change the way their icon looks, similar to the one used for Google Play, which will make it more recognizable to users, and rename it either "Google Play" or "Setting."

List of Adware Apps

The adware apps that used to be readily available in the Play Store are no longer available now. However, those users who have downloaded them, unfortunately need to detect them in their Settings to manually uninstall them to make sure that they have been removed from their device.

Despite the limited value they add to computers, system cleaners and optimizers remain popular categories of software applications. Criminals online are aware that a large number of users would experiment with such solutions in the hopes of extending the lifespan of their devices.

As a result, they frequently disguise malicious apps as benign alternatives.This has led to an enormous number of downloads for the specific type of applications.

According to BleepingComputer, here are the list of mobile apps that was detected to have adware: