Nine Months Of Living Dangerously

Last Updated on May 18, 2011

The title of this post is not a subset of the famous Peter Weir’s Movie “The Year Of Living Dangerously“, featuring Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver, but rather refers to the dangerous months which the Android is living, from the second half of 2010 to this first half of 2011, which saw a dramatic increase in Android Malware.

I enjoyed in summarizing in a single picture the mobile malware which affected Google Mobile OS from August 2010 to the present day. As shown the results are not encouraging and seems to confirm, in a qualitative form, the 400% increase in mobile malware (in six months) recently stated by Juniper Networks: un the second half of 2011 we assisted mainly to variants of the first Trojan. In the first half of 2011 the landscape has become much more complicated with mobile malware tailored “for different needs”.

So far the threats are can be divided essentially into two categories:

Malware capable of stealing data, sending them to a remote C&C, which in a mobile platform may have worst consequences since it may send remote data to a C&C Server);
Malware capable of sending SMS to premium rate numbers without the user permission (and awareness).

In many cases the malware was downloaded by parallel markets (most of all from China and Russia), with often the pornography acting like a decoy for the unfortunates, hence showing the risks connected with sideloading, that is the practice to enable installation of applications downloaded from external markets.

Two examples were particularly meaningful: the example of Geinimi, which showed all the features of a Botnet. And the example of DroidDream which bypassed all the security control of Android Market and infected something between 50.000 and 200.000 users according to Symantec and were remotely removed by Google, thus prefiguring a new security model which remotely manages the security functions of endpoint (and everything suggests that this trend will soon spread to more traditional endpoints: just today I stumbled upon this really interesting article).

By the way… Just today, three German security researchers discovered a serious flaw on the ClientLogin Authentication Protocol affecting almost all the Android powered devices… Ok it is not a malware, but the security concerns for the Google Mobile Operating System are more relevant than ever…