The number of cyberattacks launched against mobile users was down last year, researchers have found — but don’t pop the champagne just yet. The decline was offset by jacked-up, more sophisticated, more nimble mobile nastiness.
In a Monday
report, Kaspersky said that its researchers have observed a downward trend in the number of attacks on mobile users, as shown in the chart below. However, “attacks are becoming more sophisticated in terms of both malware functionality and vectors,” according to Kaspersky experts Tatyana Shiskova and Anton Kivva.
“In the reporting period, after a surge in H2 2020, cybercriminal activity gradually abated: There were no global newsbreaks or major campaigns, and the COVID-19 topic began to fade,” according to Monday’s report. “At the same time, new players continue to emerge on the cyberthreat market as malware becomes more sophisticated; thus, the fall in the overall number of attacks is ‘compensated’ by the greater impact of a successful attack. Most dangerous of all in this regard are banking malware and spyware.”
The company’s mobile products and technologies detected 97,661 new mobile banking trojans, along with 3,464,756 malicious installation packages and 17,372 new mobile ransomware trojans.
The number of malicious installation packages observed in 2021 actually dropped substantially, down 2,218,938 from 2020 and slightly down from the 3,503,952 packages discovered in 2019.
threatpost.com
