Android Market is safer than we thought, its 'Bouncer' kicks out bad apps
Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google's Vice President of Engineering for the Android mobile platform, revealed on Thursday that the Android Market has secretly had a system in place named "Bouncer" to scan apps for malicious code.
"Bouncer" was running in secret for most of 2011, and Lockheimer says that the period between the first and second halves of 2011 showed a 40% decrease in the number of potentially-malicious downloads from Android Market.
This statement runs contrary to the reports from Juniper Networks last November, who said Android malware had grown some 472 percent in the last six months of 2011.
"This drop occurred at the same time that companies who market and sell anti-malware and security software have been reporting that malicious applications are on the rise," Lockheimer said. "While it’s not possible to prevent bad people from building malware, the most important measurement is whether those bad applications are being installed from Android Market - and we know the rate is declining significantly."
The potential for the Android platform to carry malware was a problem that security companies warned us about from the very beginning, especially since apps could be freely installed from unknown sources and the Android Market initially had no vetting process in place for new apps.
Gradually, reports of new malware in the Android Market began to pile up. In 2010 there was a notable SMS Trojan, and then the Geinimi Trojans. Then in 2011, Android malware made headlines again when Google removed 21 apps from the Android Market for containing malicious code, and reports of Android malware really increrased.
Of course, not everyone was quite as alarmist as Juniper Networks about Android malware. Last August, McAfee's second quarter 2011 Threats Report said Android was indeed the most common target for mobile malware, but that the total number of threats for the platform was only 155 out of the 6 million total malwares in the wild.
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