Malware on phones

[Berserker]

If you have an android phone watch out what you download:
- Over 90% of all phone malware are for android
- 6.5% of all free android apps are malware.

Apple users, you are fine - for now. Their tight control on what goes in their app store helped keep them secure. Also since malware tends to go for the lowest hanging fruit, which today is Android, that helped too.
- Apple holds 22% of world's phone market, yet only 0.7% of malware.

http://www.f-secure.com/en/web/labs_glo ... rs/reports

(the Q4 2012 report is has some nice graphs of growth over the last 3 years. Q1 2013 has the most current stats. Interesting reads.)

[Fritz]

Its actually pretty obvious and easy to avoid. It's the price of diversity. Those numbers sound inflated anyway. I can believe the 90% of malware being on android phones since apple is very tight in their control of their app store (the advantage of being so proprietary), but 6% of android apps having malware sounds bogus. As a long time android user, that would mean I statistically should have downloaded numerous pieces of malware by now. It's never happened.

[Berserker]

Perhaps 6% sounds high, perhaps it's news hype, but I think it's true. Malware has increased exponentially every year and will continue to do so. It's a really big moneymaker.

You probably didn't get one because you were careful (or you might actually have one and just don't know you do -- that's the power of malware). A lot of malware pretends to be something legit and does things in the background depending on what its intended purpose is (adds, steal your contacts, steal your bank account, monitor your calls, GPS coordinates, track your surfing behavior and buying patterns, etc). Some do exactly what the user expects them to do, but in the background install other software that goes to town on you. But generally they all try to mask themselves as legit application. It's not something you will be able to just look at the app and say, oh yeah, there's a Trojan in that app.

The reports from f-secure have some cool examples of the Trojans you could get. Form example, some of the performance enhancing apps actually have malware in them. Some are legit. Some are not. Can you tell the difference?

Anyway, this post was to ensure that you all pay attention to what you download especially on Androids since they don't control their app market today (not to say that in the future you won't see more on apple or windows).