Google has removed roughly 300 apps from its Play Store after security researchers from several internet infrastructure companies discovered that the seemingly harmless apps—offering video players and ringtones, among other features—were secretly hijacking Android devices to provide traffic for large-scale distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. The botnet, nicknamed WireX, caught the attention of security researchers at the content delivery network Akamai when it was used to attack one of its clients earlier this month. Akamai’s client, a multinational hospitality company, was hit with traffic from hundreds of thousands of IP addresses. “We identified approximately 300 apps associated with the...