“As a hacker, you can take the official application and make it free, and have hidden malware — the original app owner doesn’t know,” says Jukka Alanen, vice president of business development at Arxan Technologies and author of the study, “Mobile Apps under Attack.”
Beyond its look to find pirated and malware-laden versions of paid apps, Arxan also says it found that 40% of the top 15 free Apple iOS apps and 80% of the top 15 free Android apps (based on May 2012) were found to be hacked in a similar way.