Caution: Immediately uninstall 24 extremely dangerous applications from your devices!

The Google Play Store is often overwhelmed by relying on malware and it takes a lot of effort from security experts to locate and remove them.

Σaccording to recent reports from VPNPro, a Chinese company with a name Shenzhen HAWK, "Is secretly behind 24 popular applications that seek dangerous licenses."

These applications are no longer in Google Play Store, but before their deletion they had already managed to have 382 million downloads.

"We take security and privacy breaches seriously", Said the Google to the journalist Jacques Doffman of Forbes . “If we find behavior that violates our policies, we take action."

And that's what happened here. Before continuing with the report, the 24 applications are listed in the image below

One of the applications, Hi Security, required the right to use a "very" strange license in VPN applications, and after a series of investigations, it was found that this application has links to the Shenzhen HAWK.

Shenzhen HAWK in particular is a subsidiary of TCL Corporation, a huge and partly state-owned Chinese electronics company. This is not the first report of TCL involvement in malware.

Last year, we had reports of the malicious Weather Forecast app hitting the web. In 2017, the Indian government found that Virus Cleaner (another application from Hi Security) was hiding "spyware or other malware".

A few days ago, two apps called Super Battery and Dig It were still available for download. However, Google has confirmed that all 24 apps are no longer available in the Google Play Store. However, if you happen to have any of these applications installed, it is in your best interest to uninstall them immediately.

While six of the 24 applications require access to the user's camera, both want to penetrate the phone and contacts application. This means that they can make phone calls or send messages secretly and without your knowledge.

From the list above, 15 applications need access to GPS (location) and can read data from external storage. In addition, 14 of these applications can transmit data about a user's phone and network to Chinese Servers. In fact, one of these applications can record audio on their server or on your device, while someone else can access your contacts even while you're talking.

With all these permissions, these applications have collective access to your entire device. They can also communicate with an external server controlled by their developers. Ever wonder why you get some ads for the things you shop for often?

Once the app has location information, it can know your preferences and sell that information to advertisers who will then be able to customize the unwanted ads for you. This is probably the least risk associated with these applications.

But the most important thing is that once your device is broken, other worse situations can follow. They can install other hidden code on the devices, which collects your personal data.