Digital threat management company RiskIQ identified hundreds of antivirus apps which actually contain adware, trojans, and other malware.

“There’s been a recent rise in fake WannaCry ‘protectors’, apps that use the fear and hysteria around the self-propagating ransomware to drive downloads, even though mobile systems are safe from its impact,” the company said in a report.

Searching the term “antivirus” returned a total of 6,295 apps claiming to be associated with antivirus software in some way. More than 700 of these triggered blacklist detections from VirusTotal, a malware scanning service, of which 525 are currently active apps.

In Google Play, there are 655 antivirus apps, of which 131 had triggered blacklist detections. Of these, 55 are blacklisted.

The report noted the Google Play store has a greater percentage of blacklisted antivirus apps, at 20 per cent versus the average of 11 per cent. However, the percentage of current blacklisted antivirus apps in the Google Play store is 10.8 per cent, compared with an average of 12.2 per cent.

RiskIQ pointed out not all blacklisted apps are necessarily malicious and warned many malicious antivirus apps are not blacklisted at all.

However, VirusTotal can be used as a way to gauge the riskiness of scanned files.

The company said users should be wary of antivirus apps and try to only download them from official stores. Google, for example, seems to be diligently removing malicious apps at a greater rate than third-party stores.

Users must also review the permissions requested by an app. What’s more, if the developer’s email address is a free email service like Gmail or Hotmail, or if the app description is riddled with grammatical errors, this should be a red flag.