BeiTaAd : 100 Million Plus Android Users found to be affected by BeiTaAd adware plugin

BeiTaAd : 100 Million Plus Android Users found to be affected by BeiTaAd adware plugin

Despite Google's lot of efforts to provide better security for its Android users in terms of blocking harmful apps entering on Play store, some apps still continues to evade the shield and affects users.

One of those was uncovered today, by security researcher Kristina Balaam from lookout.com.

In a blog post, Kristina has reveled that 238 apps contained a plugin called BeiTaAd, and this adware plugin has caused serious issues to Android users by displaying out of app ads.



The issues include aggressive display of ads even when the screen is locked (Lock screen ads) and preventing the users to attend even phone calls by making the phone unresponsive to actions.  

It was now discovered that, lot of app developers has already included this SDK to display ads on their apps, without any big inspections, because of only one reason, "It was from the trusted Chinese company CooTek ", which developed the infamous 100 million users using Touchpal custom Keyboard app.

The good news is, this plugin was successfully removed and the apps that used this plugins earlier were updated to latest version without the plugin, which provides relief to some users but there are some other users who are yet to update their apps, and their privacy might be at risk warns Google .

If you are using one of those 238 apps, we recommend you to update those apps to the latest version to prevent your device getting affected.

You can read the complete list of apps that are affected on their official blog (Link opens in new window)