One in five apps from the top 150 free VPN Android apps in Google's Play Store was flagged as a potential source of malware, while a quarter of them come with user privacy breaking bugs such as DNS leaks which expose user DNS queries to their ISPs.
As found by Simon Migliano, Metric Labs' Head of Research, the company behind the Top10VPN service, these VPN Android applications have already been installed approximately 260 million times according to the numbers reported by Google's official store.
Top10VPN's extensive research has been organized and published in the form of a risk index designed to help Android users understand the exact privacy risks they are exposing themselves when installing a free VPN on their smartphone or tablet.
According to Migliano's analysis and as previously stated, one in five free VPN apps tested (27 applications in total) was flagged as a potential source of malware when tested using VirusTotal, greatly increasing the severity of the risks their users are exposed too.
To make matters even worse, 25% of the apps that were affected by a DNS leak security issue. Moreover:
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