Android is the most vulnerable to malware

WASHINGTON: The craze of Android is increasing rapidly among mobile users. It is obvious because it provides us a wide range of applications that we all are fond of and and the most of the best smartphones in the world are running on it. But have you thought that it can have unknown drawbacks also? This article is specially written to aware all the user with its negative side. A security firm has stated that the Android operating system accounted for 79 per cent of all malware infections on smartphones, and the threat is multiplying.

Finland-based F-Secure said in a report that the free Google operating system, which has been gaining smartphone market share globally, has become the dominant platform targeted by hackers.

“Every quarter, malware authors bring forth new threat families and variants to lure more victims and to update on the existing ones,” the F-Secure quarterly report said.

“In the fourth quarter alone, 96 new families and variants of Android threats were discovered, which almost doubles the number recorded in the previous quarter.”

The only other platform with any significant share of malware was Symbian, the system dropped by Nokia, which F-Secure said accounted for 19 per cent.

Other major platforms including Apple’s iOS, BlackBerry and Windows Phone each had less than one per cent of mobile phone infections.

“Blackberry, iOS, Windows Mobile, they may see some threats popping up once in a while. But most likely, the threats are intended for multiple platforms,” the report noted.

There has been found different different types of malwares. F-Secure said some of the threats included “shady SMS-sending practices” that can sign up victims to an SMS-based subscription service. Other malware includes banking trojans, designed to steal passwords for online accounts and transfer money from the victims’ accounts.

One of these, called Eurograbber, came as a PC virus but tricked users into installing a version on their mobile device, and has been linked to the theft of $47 million from European customers, F-Secure said.

The report said Android malware has outpaced its share of the overall market. While its market share rose to 68.8 per cent in 2012, its malware share rose to 79 per cent from 66.7 per cent the previous year.

A recent study by Kaspersky Labs has found that the most popular targets for cyber criminals were Android devices running version 2.3.6, commonly referred to as Gingerbread, and Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich.