A Georgia Tech research, based on 58 antivirus programs for Android, has shown that these programs are still not effective and can be bypassed by hackers
Computer antivirus programs are a security. Most of them are constantly updated according to new threats and the user only needs to download the latest version to be protected.
The main problem at the moment is that antivirus for Android is very few and acts quite “primitive” compared to current threats. This backwardness of security systems for smartphones with Google’s operating system has been highlighted by a research, which involved 58 different antivirus, carried out by researchers from the University of Georgia Tech. In order to test the effectiveness of various antivirus programs, the researchers from the US university used a tool called AVPass.
Machine Learning Malware
AVPass is a tool, also used by hackers, that is used to bypass antivirus checks. Of the 58 programs tested, only two were able to track down the AVPass tool: AhnLab and WhiteArmor. Android malware according to most experts will be the main security problem, for companies and individuals, in the near future. Not least because Android viruses use machine learning to adapt to the various attacks carried and prevent scanning programs from detecting and blocking them. In addition to AVPass, Georgia Tech experts have used two other tools. The first one is called Virus Total and the second one is called Imitation Mode. With Virus Total you can test the potential of the antivirus because the program simulates over 300 different hacker attacks and sees which ones the security program manages to block. While Imitation Mode checks if the antivirus scan is effective. As Georgia Tech experts explain, Android malware is not as complexly structured as PC malware at the moment, and this should encourage cybersecurity companies to invest in the sector in order to create effective and reliable programs.