Company finds over 40,000 suspicious mobile banking apps

Jan 22, 2015 22:57 GMT  ·  By

A research regarding the mobile apps used for financial transactions revealed that more than 11% of them should be considered at least suspicious, many of them containing malware and adware.

According to a study from RiskIQ, the top 90 app stores in the world host about 350,000 apps relating to banking and finance. Out of these, more than 40,000 are laced with threats or potentially dangerous components.

Trojans and adware are most prevalent

RiskIQ is a company that relies on a vast crawling infrastructure to collect real-time information from the web that would help its customers maintain the integrity of their web and mobile property.

With mobile banking becoming a more common activity all over the world, cybercriminals also adjust to the new environment. “One of the easiest ways to steal a victim’s login and other personal information is using malware and apps with excessive permissions,” says the company’s CEO, Elias Manousos.

According to the findings, out of the more than 40,000 apps inspected by the automated systems, 21,076 contained adware, while 20,000 integrated a Trojan of some sort.

Spyware was also detected in 3,823 Android apps intended for online banking purposes. Only a small fraction of them included malicious JavaScript or exploit code.

Pay attention to permissions

As it was expected, most of the apps would present an excessive list of permissions to the user, who most of the times would agree to them without even taking a glance at them.

It appears that most of the rotten apps included the capability to capture device logs and record audio. Another popular demand was access to the list of contacts, as well as reading SMS messages, very useful for extracting the two-factor authentication (2FA) code.

In a number of 1,148 of the cases, the financial mobile app would ask for permission to install packages.

Despite these gloomy figures, there is a simple way to maintain the safety of the sensitive information, and that is to limit downloading and installing apps to reputed sources only.

“These findings show that criminals are using look-a-like banking apps to distribute malware and capture data on the device in order to commit crimes. Policing app stores for malicious apps and taking them down is a never ending battle for banks, and any other brand that uses the mobile channel to interact with customers,” Manousos says.