Coronavirus-themed Mobile Apps (Malware) Dataset

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. For more details, please visit https://covid19apps.github.io

This dataset includes the following files:

(1) covid19apps.xlsx

In this file, we list all the COVID-19 themed apps information, including apk file hashes, released date, package name, AV-Rank, etc. 

(2)covid19apps.zip

We put the COVID-19 themed apps Apk samples in zip files . In order to reduce the size of a single file, we divide the sample into multiple zip files for storage. And the APK file name after the file SHA256.

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}
}