This is not the first time when world’s leading mobile OS – developed by Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) – is being accused of holding maximum number of malicious and high-risk apps. 2012 was the year of malware affected Android apps. Surprisingly, this has resulted to a figures which PC malware has taken a decade to come up to. The trend is continued in 2013 also as the number has reached to 7, 18,000 malware affected Android applications in June 2013 from 5,09,000 applications within a year. In fact, numbers already doubled in first half of this year. The most of malware applications are a mimicry of popular applications which users download to enjoy costly services. A sizable number of these affected Android applications are replicated as the originals ones and capitalize on cost of download.
The following graph illustrates the threat distribution of various Android malware. Premium service abusers remained the most dominant mobile threat.
We can clearly observe from the above graph that users opting for premium services are more victimized, personal and banking information is also retrieved and exploited. The below brief list of top two most dangerous Android malwares:
OBAD (ANDROIDOS_OBAD.A)
This malware takes away the administrative controls from the user and continuously pops up notifications to grant permissions from the user and is very difficult to cleanup.
FAKEBANK
Affects the SD card through APK’s and displays similar icons and user interface to banking applications which can to lead to loss banking of data and money.
Some forms of Android malware have been found to attached along with spam which infect your mobiles the moment you open it.
Top Android Malware Affected Countries
In following graphs we can see top 5 countries which download malware and are prone to privacy exposure risk.
UAE has taken over Myanmar with huge difference and there are 6 new countries in the top 10 list this quarter. This also means that the emerging markets are doing well and getting affected as well simultaneously.
We can observe in the above graph that the population and usage of phones and irrelevant and countries with low population like Saudi Arabia have a tremendous exposure of risk than huge countries like Brazil, India. Another insight could be out of the fact that the people in western and Asian continents are more progressive in protecting their Android mobiles from malware and infections. This data graph could be source of great market potential for a security service provider in Arabian countries and Other Asian countries.
Attack in the Banking sector
It is being observed that that cyber criminals are not really interested in gushing new viruses into the market but have found their lost love with old PC malware. They are repacking the old ones and Q2 2013 has seen a 29% in the detection of these types. The Mobile Attack is increasing in a fast pace in Brazil , and most of the Bank-attack Malware are usually spoofed up as as Adobe Flash Player hosted in compromised sites.
Is is no surprise to find USA as a top victim due to extensive reliance on online banking but Brazil is a surprise.
In the following info graph we can see out cyber criminals have been exploiting user through social Abuse malware .
Android - being the largest used mobile OS developed on open source platform – is the most targeted, Android users must start taking their mobile security seriously as there have been very steps by Google to tackle this menace. Relatively iOS is a safer software.
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