Android banking malware has increased by 159% in T1 2021
While companies are struggling under continuous ransomware attacks, Android users are increasingly becoming targets of banking malware. According to a survey by the security agency ESET, the number of such malware has increased by 159% in the past few months.
ESET said that although the number of banking malware targeting the Android operating system has risen sharply, due to Google’s continuous improvement of the security of the Android operating system and increased screening of the Play Store, the overall threat detected by the Android operating system has dropped by 18.8% month-on-month.
“Malware Notification”by Christoph Scholz is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
According to the report:
Just as in T3 2020, Android Banking Malware has continued to grow substantially, during T1 2021 by
158.7%. On our top 10 list, Android Banking Malware is represented by Android/TrojanDropper.Agent
trojan (26.4%), which was the most widespread Android threat overall in T1, and by Android/Spy.Banker trojan (but at only 2.0%). Other categories that continued to grow during first four months of this
year were Scam Apps (+93%), Cryptominers (+38%), Ransomware (+25%), and Spyware (+13%).
The report also mentioned that in March of this year, there was a flaw in the WebView of the Android system, which caused a large number of applications to crash. Although this problem has only existed for 7 hours, it has caused a lot of Android users to download security software from the app store.
ESET stated that this is a real case, which shows that such a large-scale incident will make Android users suddenly interested in network security so that users started to investigate themselves by downloading cybersecurity apps.
