Android under attack: 350 new malware appear every hour

The fact that mobile phone users are an attractive target for cybercriminals is no secret to anyone. It used to be with the help of phones only to call or send SMS. Now, using their phone, people send and receive money, manage a bank account or electronic wallet. Therefore, to seize access to someone else's phone in many cases means to get access to the accounts of the victim. In addition, intruders may be interested in the personal data of the user himself, or else the phone itself as an element of some large-scale system, like a botnet.

To this end, cybercriminals are developing more and more new programs and exploits, the purpose of which is to crack the protection of the phone or mislead the user. According to experts from the company G Data, new malware for Android appear every 10 seconds. By the end of this year, the number of malware programs could increase up to 3.5 million.

Cybersecurity experts say that the owners of phones whose devices do not receive regular updates are most at risk. Of course, daily updates are not a guarantee of security, but it gives at least something. If there are no updates, then the user remains with the phone on the OS version, whose vulnerabilities are well known to cybercriminals. Of course, these vulnerabilities are exploited very actively.
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The growth trend in the number of malicious programs for Android is noticeable to the naked eye. In 2015, for example, experts were able to detect and identify about 2.3 million infected applications. In 2016, already 3.2 million. Well, this year, as mentioned above, this figure may well grow up to 3.5 million or even more.



According to representatives of G Data, the most actively exploited vulnerabilities in operating systems such as Android Lollipop and Marshmallow. For these two versions of the Android OS, about two thirds of all mobile malware is released.

Here is a breakdown by the percentage of malware for each version of Android (here we should not forget that some representatives of malware perfectly hit the vulnerabilities of various versions of the OS):

• Gingerbread (2.3 - 2.3.7): 0.9%;
• Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0.3 - 4.0.4): 0.9%;
• Jelly Bean (4.1.x - 4.3): 10.1%;
• KitKat (4.4): 20.0%;
• Lollipop (5.0 - 5.1): 32.0%;
• Marshmallow (6.0): 31.2%;
• Nougat (7.0 - 7.1): 4.9%.

If we consider that 9 out of 10 mobile phones in the world are working on Android, then you can not be surprised at the choice of intruders. The indicator in question was reached at the end of 2016.

As a percentage, Adnroid received at that time 87.5% of the mobile device market and has since retained this result. In November last year, it became known, in just the 3rd quarter of 2016, more than 328.6 million gadgets were released on Android. During the same period, Apple shipped about 45.5 million of its smartphones, reducing its figure by about 5.2% in just one year. True, the situation has now improved for Apple, because the iPhone 7 is selling very well.

If as many people used smartphones on iOS, cybercriminals would break this system no less actively.



Of the Android versions, Android 7 can be considered the most secure, which was released last August. But only 4.9% of users now deal with this version. And 20% work with the previous, sixth. The problem, as mentioned above, is that most mobile phone manufacturers stop technical support too quickly, even for their flagships. As a result, users need to either work with what they have, or install third-party solutions, or buy phones with a new version of the operating system.

This situation is very different from, for example, the device market on OS Windows. So, Microsoft only relatively recently stopped supporting Windows XP and Vista, and then, for corporate users, partial technical support remains. For Windows 10, everything is still ahead - Microsoft will stop supporting it only in October 2025 .

In general, the only thing that experts on cyber security can advise is to be updated on time and not download suspicious applications. In addition, they usually recommend downloading programs from the Play Store, but this is not a panacea - infected software or programs with hidden features that the user is unlikely to be happy appear in the application catalog from Google regularly.