Apparently, Android malware increased from 238 threats in 2012 to 804 new families and variants in 2013. Aside from Symbian, F-Secure found no new threats for other mobile operating systems in 2013. The most interesting part is that Android threats come from weird places. For example, of the top 10 countries reporting Android malware detections in the second half of 2013, 3/4 of the reports originated from Saudi Arabia and India. In the meanwhile, the 5 European countries in the list only accounted for 15% of reported detections altogether.
One more problem is that Android OS has become extremely popular, so malware authors are really interested in mounting attacks on it. Security firm added that despite the extreme focus of malware writers on the Android platform, it would be incorrect to say that Google has done nothing about it. To be fair, only 0.1% of all the malware threats could be found on Google Play. This means that 3rd-party app stores were the most likely sources of mobile malware.
Such stores sourcing infected apps include Anzhi, Mumayi, Baidu and eoeMarket: all of them cater to the mainland Chinese user population which doesn’t have full access to Google Play. About 10% of the samples there were identified as malicious. Google Play is at the bottom of the dangerous list, containing the lowest percentage of malware. Security experts noted that the Play Store was most likely to promptly remove nefarious apps, so even that 0.1% of malware tends to have a short shelf life.
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