covid19apps.github.io

Coronavirus-themed Mobile Malware Dataset

Overview

As COVID-19 continues to spread across the world, a growing number of malicious campaigns are exploiting the pandemic. It is reported that COVID-19 is being used in a variety of online malicious activities, including Email scam, ransomware and malicious domains. As the number of the afflicted cases continue to surge, malicious campaigns that use coronavirus as a lure are increasing. Malicious developers take advantage of this opportunity to lure mobile users to download and install malicious apps.

However, besides a few media reports, the coronavirus-themed mobile malware has not been well studied. Our community lacks of the comprehensive understanding of the landscape of the coronavirus-themed mobile malware, and no accessible dataset could be used by our researchers to boost COVID-19 related cybersecurity studies.

We make efforts to create a daily growing COVID-19 related mobile app dataset. By the time of mid-November, we have curated a dataset of 4,322 COVID-19 themed apps, and 611 of them are considered to be malicious. The number is growing daily and our dataset will update weekly.

The number of COVID-19 related apps and malware over the time (from January to mid-November 2020).

COVID19 themed apps information

In our dataset, we collect 4,322 COVID-19 themed apps and 611 of them are considered to be malicious. To boost the research on coronavirus-themed cybersecurity threats, We have released a daily growing dataset to the research community.

In this page, we show all the COVID-19 themed apps information, including apk file hashes, released date, package name, AV-Rank, etc. For more details, please click COVID-19 themed apps Information or download the file.

Access the Apk samples

We are happy to share our COVID19 themed dataset (APK file). However, in order to prevent any misuse, we kindly ask you to send us a mail to covid19apps@outlook.com stating your identity and research scope. We will then send you the APK file samples.

Our dataset is available on Zenodo, please visit Coronavirus-themed Mobile Malware Dataset to download.

If your papers or articles use our dataset, please use the following bibtex reference to cite our paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14619 (Accepted to Empirical Software Engineering)

    @misc{wang2021virus,
          title={Beyond the Virus: A First Look at Coronavirus-themed Mobile Malware}, 
          author={Liu Wang and Ren He and Haoyu Wang and Pengcheng Xia and Yuanchun Li and Lei Wu and Yajin Zhou and Xiapu Luo and Yulei Sui and Yao Guo and Guoai Xu},
          year={2021},
          eprint={2005.14619},
          archivePrefix={arXiv},
          primaryClass={cs.CR}
    }