Android malware to increase in 2013!

Viruses and worms spreading through flash drives along with rise in malware targeting Android OS are the main trends of malware landscape in India in 2013, predicts ESET, the leader in proactive protection against cyber threats.

Malware for mobile phones was marked a main trend of 2012 in last year's ESET report. This time researcher focused on malware for Android OS as the market share of Android mobile phones have been increasing dramatically.

Not only an exponential growth of mobile malware but the fact that malware is becoming more complex thus expanding the range of malicious actions they perform on an infected device makes it the main concern for security community in 2013.

ESET highlights another trend: the malware propagation by means of removable storage devices is decreasing globally in favor of the use of an intermediary in order to attract new victims. Simply speaking, instead of compromising system through infected flash drives and other removable media, bad guys compromise web servers to host malware and then sending out the hyperlinks leading the users to the malware.

"There are over 27 million smartphone users in India, according to different estimations. Though it comes to about only 3 percent of total mobile phone users in the country, we see the huge growth of smartphones' usage. Moreover, even the majority of cheap handsets run Android OS. Although we didn't register many cases of Android malware in India, comparing to some other countries, once Indian will start actively using their mobiles for online shopping, banking, etc. the picture will change immediately", says Pankaj Jain, Director at ESET India.

Although throughout 2012 all detections related to INF/Autorun malware family, variety of malware using the file autorun.inf on Windows computers as a way of compromising a PC, have been steadily decreasing in India, this threat continues dominating. That means USB flash drives are still an effective way of compromising computers. One of the reasons, according to ESET researchers, is that Indian users are still prone to using pirated software including OS itself along with pirated security software if at all the latter is installed on the system. Moreover, a very basic security practice as scanning removable media with security software is ignored by majority of Indian computer users.