According to the recent study, the attacks on smartphones with this operating systems are rapidly rising.
NQ Mobile security solutions company has just released a report that has shown that the number of malware attacks that are occurring on devices that are based on the Android operating system significantly increased in 2012.
The report was issued on Monday and underlined the importance of smartphone protections against attacks.
The report drew attention to the fact that as the operating system becomes increasingly popular, so do the attempts to infect it from those with unethical intentions. It urged consumers using smartphones to become aware of the risks of using mobile security devices and to alter their behaviors in order to protect themselves against attacks.
The mobile security report showed that the popularity of Android does make it a malware target.
As a whole, the number of mobile security attacks that were recorded on Android smartphones were recorded to have doubled from 2011 to 2012. According to the authors of the report, this has made these devices among the most profitable cybercriminal trends. Last year the most commonly used techniques of this nature were phishing and smishing, which are those that are used in an attempt to gain use of the personal and/or financial information of the users.
Among the primary mobile security results that were noted by the report include:
• An increase of 163 percent in the instance of malware, as 65,227 new malware pieces were discovered last year, when compared to 24,794 which were discovered the year before.
• A specific target of malware of 94.8 percent toward Android devices last year. Comparatively, only 4 percent of these harmful attacks were geared specifically toward Symbian based devices.
• Of all of the mobile security malware that was discovered last year, 28 percent had been designed for the specific intention of obtaining personal and financial data from users for the purpose of profit for the attacker.
This mobile security report has supported the results of other studies that are revealing that there is a rapidly growing trend of malware issues on smartphones, as their popularity continues to grow worldwide.
