Tag: app downloads

According to a recent study, Android device users are taking quite a casual attitude toward their vulnerabilities.

Proofpoint, a cyber and mobile security firm, has now released a report that has shown that users of Android devices had willingly downloaded more than two billion apps containing malicious code in 2015.

Those findings with regards to the downloading of malicious mobile apps were published in the Human Factor Report.

That report provides a closer view of the most recent cyber and mobile security trends throughout social media, mobile apps and email. Among the top findings of this report, one that is drawing a considerable amount of attention is the fact that malicious mobile applications are affecting the United States the most, with China in second place. The findings also pointed out that many of the problems with malicious apps come from downloads that are occurring in marketplaces outside of official channels.

These marketplaces are posing a considerable mobile security threat that device users seem to be ignoring.

The researchers from Proofpoint discovered rogue app stores that were giving mobile device users the opportunity to download “free” clones of popular apps for both Android and iOS devices but that contained malicious code. In many circumstances, the games were clones of premium apps that were being offered for free, or included those that had been banned from the official Apple iTunes Store, luring people to these rogue marketplaces with their offer of something that was certainly too good to be true.

In order to be able to download those mobile apps, the users would have had to bypass a number of cyber security warnings along the way. Despite that fact, and the fact that downloading from those marketplaces increases the risk of downloading a malicious app by four times, many people are continuing with this activity.

The mobile security issues presented by these malicious apps can include anything from the sharing of personal information and data to revealing passwords to third parties. Downloads from those marketplaces surged during the fourth quarter of last year. Among the malicious apps that were indeed downloaded, data was communicated to 57 different countries. Of the data that was transmitted, 19 percent went to China.

This new milestone has suggested that the company’s strategy to cross platforms is a successful one.

According to the latest download figures, Microsoft Office apps have now been downloaded over 100 million times, which has indicated that despite a great deal of controversy surrounding the cross platform strategy that the company has adopted, it is paying off.

The suite of apps has been made available to users of Android, iOS and recently Windows Phone based devices.

The software and technology giant held its third quarter earnings call, last week, and revealed that its Microsoft Office apps have been doing very well on the operating systems of its rivals, Google and Apple. “We are clearly taking Office everywhere” explained the company’s CEO, Satya Nadella, as it described the rapidly growing popularity of the suite of applications.

He went on to state that “Core to our mobile first strategy is to ensure that our service end points are on every mobile device, and to that end we have seen continued momentum with more than 100 million downloads of Office on iPhones, iPads, and Android tablets.”

Nadella pointed out that the cross platform versions of the Microsoft Office apps is only the start.

He also discussed the recent release of Outlook mobile apps on the Android and iOS platforms which occurred in the second quarter of this year. Moreover, Nadella also said that the company is making updates to its OneDrive applications and that said that there would very soon be a preview of an upcoming version of the Office software suite that has been designed for Mac computers. This, he said, means that the Office service is now being made available to users on more devices than ever before.

This represents considerable achievements for Microsoft, since the rise in use of Microsoft Office apps has also meant that there has been a notable increase in the subscriptions to Office 365. According to the figures cited by Nadella, that service is now seeing an average of 1 million new customers every month and that the company now has over 12 million subscribers to that service. That represents a very healthy growth of 35 percent over what it had been in the quarter before.