By Study Finds Research

These apps are not only difficult to detect, but they can also leak your sensitive information without your knowledge. The team warns that it's important to be aware of this issue and take steps to protect yourself and your privacy.

"This is a real-life problem and we want to raise awareness for everyone, from victims to the research community," says Enze Alex Liu, the first author of the paper, in a university release.

Spyware apps are often marketed as tools to monitor children or employees, but they can also be used by abusers to secretly spy on their partners. These apps are designed to record everything that happens on a victim's device, including text messages, emails, photos, and even phone calls. The abusers can then access this information remotely through a web portal. The use of spyware apps has been on the rise, with a significant increase in their usage in recent years.

To find out if your device has been infected with a spyware app, you can check your privacy dashboard and the list of all apps in your device's settings. However, these apps are specifically designed to remain hidden, making them difficult to detect.

The study focused on analyzing 14 leading spyware apps for Android phones. While Google does not allow the sale of these apps on its official app store, they can still be downloaded separately from the web. This is in contrast to iPhones, which do not allow such "side-loading" of apps, making spyware apps less prevalent on this platform.