Mobile malware attacks are becoming more common as cyber criminals increasingly turn their attention towards smartphones – and they're ensuring that malicious activity is harder to uncover.
According to figures in the newly released
McAfee Mobile Threat Report, the total number of detections for different types of mobile malware reached over 35 million during the final quarter of 2019, representing a jump of 10 million detections compared with 2018.
Analysis by researchers at McAfee found that half of these detections were what they class as 'hidden apps'; malicious applications that once installed are designed to completely avoid discovery on the device and therefore extremely difficult to remove.
The key goal of these applications is to generate money for the attacker, which often comes in the form of the infected device downloading apps and automatically clicking on advertising links in the background, or constantly bombarding the user with pop-up adverts they can't get rid of.
"There are thousands of apps out there that are actively hiding their processes after installation. Of course, that makes it difficult for people to delete them – so they just bug the hell out of people with invasive adverts and other things. But it's making money for bad guys, that's the reality," Raj Samani, chief scientist at McAfee, told ZDNet.
In order to help bypass security protections offered to Android users by the Google Play Store, cyber criminals are turning towards other channels to help distribute their malicious apps. This often sees attackers use comments below YouTube videos, or links in popular chat apps like Discord, that claim to offer free or cracked versions of well-known applications.
