Kaspersky Report Shows Financial Attacks On Android Devices Tripled In 2014

It is no secret that mobile devices are becoming more targeted by criminals. After all, they are also becoming far more entwined with our lives as a whole. As a result, they know more about us, hold more information about us and therefore, reveal more information about us. This is why they are and will continue to be a viable platform for criminals to focus their efforts on. What’s more, with android being the dominant platform in the world and over a billion android divices out there, it makes sense for criminals to focus attempts on the android platform. Thus increasing the chance of a user falling foul to identify theft.

Following on from this, known internet security solution provider Kaspersky Lab have this morning released their findings from their Financial Cyberthreats in 2014 report (source link below). The big headline from the report is that their software found the number of financial attacks experienced by android users in 2014 had more than tripled compared to the previous year. This saw the number of attacks reaching 2,317,194 which is up from 2013’s figure of 711,993. Likewise, this also saw a more than trebling in the number of users attacked, rising from 212,890 up to 775,887. It will be not be a surprise that financial attacks are increasing at such a speedy rate as financial data is such a sought after commodity. In fact the same report detailed that 48.15% of all attacks noted by Kaspersky software were attacks which specifically targeted financial data.

In terms of the actual attacks, it seems two particular malware were responsible for virtually all the attacks. These are what is known as Trojan-SMS malware and Trojan-Banker malware. Of the two, the former (SMS) was the sheer overriding culprit and responsible for 2,217,979 of the 2,317,194 attacks noted. This is where the malware tries to connect with an outside source via SMS. It had been believed that this sort of attack was decreasing due to the use of Advice of Charge (AoC) technology built into newer platforms where the user is advised of outgoing texts. However the latest report shows the Trojan-SMS seemed to be making a return towards the end of the year. In contrast, the Trojan-Banker malware which only accounted for 99,215 of the attacks is when the malware looks to steal the user’s online banking credentials and CC information. This is achieved by replicated and replacing the input boxes on apps which is used to authenticate the user. If you are interested in reading more than you can read the full report by clicking the source link below.

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