Android users on high alert as malware, phishing and scams are projected to rise

by Sanjay Katkar - CTO at Quick Heal Technologies - Monday, 1 February 2016.
 
Android phones are popular and growing more so every day. According to research firm IDC, there were close to 350 million active smartphones worldwide in the second quarter of 2015, and approximately 80 percent of them ran on the Android platform. That leaves about 280 million open sourced Android devices owned by 3.5 percent of the world’s total population exposed to a barrage of vulnerabilities, including malware attacks, fake apps, malvertising, phishing scams and more.
 
To put this threat in perspective, our own research shows staggering growth in the number of Android malware samples, 1.2 million to be exact, from the third quarter of 2015. Research also found 220 new families of Android malware and 147 new variants of existing Android malware families. All in all, new variants of existing malware families targeting Android devices numbered close to 600 in 2015, as of the end of Q3.
 
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