Cybercriminals continue to develop malware for smartphones. Last year, researchers found nearly 100,000 new variants of hidden malware that steal banking information.
Last year, a lot of malware was discovered that fixes smartphone users. Cybercriminals spread the malware through official app stores. Because the app stores are considered a trusted place, a lot of people download the infected applications.
The malware is hidden in a legitimate-looking application, making it a trojan. The technique is often associated with the Remote Access Trojan (RAT) virus.
Mobile market
According to research by Kaspersky, researchers discovered 97,661 new trojans for stealing financial data in 2021. In addition, they found 17,372 trojans masking ransomware for smartphones and 3,464,756 malicious Android Package files (APK). APK files come from unverified developers.
So in 2021, nearly 100,000 new trojans were discovered trying to capture banking data. Compared to 2020, that figure is nevertheless moving in the right direction. Indeed, one year earlier, researchers discovered 156,710 such trojans.
“The biggest contributors to the statistics were the Trojan-Banker.AndroidOS.Agent (37.69%), Trojan-Banker.AndroidOS.Bray (21.08%) and Trojan-Banker.AndroidOS.Fakecalls (9.91%) families,” the study summarizes.
Google Play
Google Play is one of the app stores in which trojans are occasionally found. Google employs security measures so that malicious apps have no place.
Still, there are ways around these security measures. To do so, a convenient, secure app is first released. Only after the app has been sufficiently downloaded, cybercriminals update the software allowing malware to spread to app users.