1 million pieces of malware. That is how much malware Trend Micro expects to see for the Android platform this year.
The amount of malware has, according to Trend Micro, increased more in 3 years for Android, than malware did for PC’s in 14 years.
Last year, Trend Micro predicted that the amount of malware would increase to 125,000 – but in reality it increased all the way up to 350,000, says Raimund Genes, tech director at Trend Micro, in a new report “Evolved Threats in a Post-PC World” which was just released.
Now, they predict an additional 650,000 pieces of malware will surface this year.
The malware attacks on Android devices are currently not so much focused on stealing sensitive or confidential data – such attacks are still primarily targeted against PC users, but Raimund Genes also expects this behavior to change in the future.
Most malware today comes from websites and data shows that 23% of the websites are from USA.
Most-used words in social engineering attacks in the beginning of 2012 was “law enforcement”, “tax season”, “London 2012 Olympics” and “Tibet”. Second half of 2012 it was words such as “iPhone 5”, “World of Warcraft”, “Christmas” and “Thanksgiving” that the attackers used to lure people into clicking on their stuff and become infected with malware.
This is really bad news for Android users and not surprisingly the 23% websites are from USA.
I have an iPhone 4s and have been getting plenty of spam on mine. It sucks really, but in all honesty its the way of the future with more advertising given the fact that a larger and larger percentage of web viewers are viewing via a mobile device. Too bad for Android users!
I have antivirus installed on my phone and also on my tablet, which is updating everytime I connect to Internet, so I suppose everything should be fine and there is no place for panic.
I am always worried about this exact thing. With android being such a focus of the smart phone platform it is only bound to get worse. That target is soon to change and they will start to steal your information also. Just like the PC attacks.
I still will use android; just will be more careful when browsing the web. It’s also usually quite often too what’s malware and what isn’t. I’ll give Apple credit though; I won’t even use their iOS, but at least it’s safer (or at least that’s what we assume).
As an Android user (on my tablet) its worrying to see an increasing trend in malware.
Does anyone know if its possible to get it from just downloading or using an app?
I only download apps from the google store but I suppose even then you may still have a chance of getting infected.
this is a bad news for android users even these problems could increase in the future.thanks for sharing this valuable information with us.your blog is addictive and quite interesting…