Number of Android users grows, so do attacks against them

Oct 6, 2014 23:57 GMT  ·  By

In a joint effort against cybercrime, a study conducted over the period of one year by Kaspersky and INTERPOL revealed that SMS Trojans are among the most frequent threats Android users face.

Android accounts for the largest chunk of the mobile operating system market share and it comes as no surprise that most of the attacks involving smartphones are directed at its users. According to Kaspersky, about 98% of all existing mobile malware targets the users of Google’s operating system.

Since August 1, 2013 until July 31, 2014, the security firm gathered data on attacks aiming at mobile devices, through installations of their protection solution.

More than one million users received malware in one year

Telemetry information extracted from the Kaspersky systems showed that the most prevalent form of attack was through SMS Trojans, accounting for 57.08% of all detections. These are designed to use the short message service to send texts surreptitiously to premium-rate numbers.

The company found that cybercriminals relied on 452 modifications of 62 such Trojans to carry out their malicious activity.

The popularity of this sort of threat is partly explained by the fact that in the geographical location the devices were used, SMS payments are more popular than in other regions. Russia recorded most of the attacks, but countries such as Kazakhstan, Ukraine, the UK, Spain, Vietnam, Malaysia, Germany, India, France also encounter attacks involving this type of malware.

The rise and fall and rise again of banking Trojans

Threats created to steal online banking credentials have been spotted to record an upward trend, according to statistics from the company.

“A total of 67,500 attacks involving Trojan-Banker malware against 37.7 thousand users were recorded in the analysis period,” the report from Kaspersky says.

It appears that a growing number of this type of threats is recorded, from 423 in August 2013 to 5,967 in July 2014. Another perspective is a 14 times increase.

Fortunately, banking Trojans were highly dependent of SMS Trojans that distributed them, and a downfall of the latter had the same effect on the former.

At the beginning of 2014, in Russia, the country where most telemetry data came from, mobile-phone operators started to deliver users alerts whenever a text was sent to a premium-rate number, letting them know about the cost involved. The carrier also validated the transaction by asking supplemental confirmation from the user.

However, cybercriminals were quick at finding other ways of distribution and the upward trend was once again recorded in June, when a new variant of Svpeng was discovered.

Additional information from their systems revealed that devices of 1,023,202 users recorded 3,408,112 malware detections over the course of the study.

The conclusion of the report is that the cybercrime targeting mobile devices started to grow over the last year and affects users across the globe. Criminals are not confined by the borders of their country and can conduct attacks in any region on the map.

Limiting malicious activities is not a problem for security experts alone, as they can be helped by the users, too, who need to take the necessary precautions to avoid falling victims to scams and cyber attacks.