Mobile Malware Rising; Android Worst Effected

As you will already be aware Android is currently dominating the operating system market but that’s not always good news, as some of the bad aspects of being a market leader mean you are going to be a target for fraudsters, hackers and scammers. The latest Mobile Threat Report from F-Secure shows some worrying statistics with regards to Malware and Android is one of the worst effected.

Android Malware

According to the report in Q3 2013, a total of 259 mobile threat families and variants have been detected across the the popular mobile OS’s, with a worrying 252 of them being found on Android.

As for the other 7 then they are found on Nokia’s aging Symbian OS, whilst no threats have been reported for iOS, BlackBerry, or Windows Phone. BlackBerry have long been known for their security so no real surprises on that one.

Looking into the report the threat breakdown consists mainly of Trojan Horses (more than 90% of all threats), the largest percentage of which as expected are trying to target mobile banking.

Most of the mobile banking trojans use a similar method and are of the SMSSpy variety, which basically intercepts SMS messages sent from banks in the form of secondary or two-step authentication of user credentials or online transactions.

SMSSpy differs from other malware families as it does not have a single code source and because of this it difficult to identify and intercept. F-Secure has also detected a rising count of PUAs (Potentially Unwanted Applications), which include undesirable or unwanted functionality, or inadvertently introduce security risks.

F-Secure gives some advice and says that the easiest way for malware to get onto your handset is by someone physically accessing your device, which is why locking your device or protecting it with an Anti-theft solution is recommended.

A lot of the Android malware aims to secretly send premium rate messages or calls it also makes sense to block premium-rate services at the operator level can significantly reduce your financial losses even if malware does get installed.

We think this is a great report and F-Secure also recommends that you download Android apps only from the Play Store, and to pay close attention to app permissions when installing or updating apps.

There are some very useful apps like PocketPermissions or PermissionDog can help explain many of the obscure permission requests. We also recommend using an antivirus app like Lookout if you can.

With over 1.5 million downloads a day Android is a serious force these days but this report gives us all a timely reminder that open source does come with risks, so we feel obliged to make our customers aware of these risks associated with Android and a growing operating system. Stay safe guys.

You can view the full report here – F-Secure Security Report.

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