It’s legal to scrape public data—US appeals court

Web scraping—the automated extraction of data from websites—has been around for a long time. Simultaneously cursed and praised, with nobody being able to quite land the decisive blow about whether it should be allowed, one way or another. This may have changed, thanks to a recent US appeals court...

Bogus Cryptomining Apps Infest Google Play

Google has removed eight deceptive mobile apps from the Play Store that masquerade as cryptocurrency cloud-mining applications but which really exist to lure users into expensive subscription services and other fraudulent activity. They may have been removed, but researchers at Trend Micro noted...

Viking Horde Malware Co-Ops Android Devices for Ad Fraud

The latest Android malware campaign to wend its way through Google’s Play marketplace can leverage victims’ phones for ad fraud, carry out DDoS attacks, send spam, and more, researchers warn. Dubbed Viking Horde, the campaign ropes Android devices into a botnet without their owners being any the...

Third Party Android App Store Doling Out Adware

Users looking for “cracked” Android files are in danger of running into a site that is peddling apps that are more or less a ploy to garner advertising clicks from unsuspecting users. The site, getwapi.com, boasts a collection of free, yet crooked looking downloads for Android phones including...