Google Wake Up, Android’s Soaked with Viruses

Gone are the days when Google was denying the presence of any malware threat to Android. Now Google Play is full of malwares and viruses, and no matter how attentive Google is, they spread and do their evil work at every minute. A few months ago F-Secure pointed out that malware grew by 22 times in Android Market. This must be stopped, and probably the most common variant to do it is to use an Android antivirus. But this can’t treat all cases.

There were only 139 malwares found in Android Market in Q1, 2011. As for Q1, 2012 this number reached 3063. At the moment the number of malwares counts 14.900, and this is a real danger to Android as a secure OS.

What’s more dangerous, those malwares spread via all kinds of apps and do many malefactions. At the beginning of 2012 Symantec made a statement, according to which there were almost 1-5 million Android devices infected with a virus called “Android.Counterclank.” It’s the modified variant of Trojan horse called “Android.Tonclank.” The malware was embedded in different apps and even one downloaded app from that “bunch,” infected the device. This malware sent info from the device, such as MAC Address, SIM Serial, IMEI, and IMSI, back to the malicious host.

Next, earlier Kasperky Lab found over 70 types of malicious apps in Android Market. Among them the most dangerous one was DroidKungFu, which infected Android 2.2 and higher devices. It was able to record conversations and save them in users’ microSD card. The previous version of this malware could access the smartphone’s call log and see who the user called and who called him/her.

Finally, get acquainted with another dangerous malware that spreads via text messages. It’s called UpdtBot. Its developers were very sly, as they made the virus disguise itself as a system update and spread via text messages containing a link to the malicious application file. The first wave of the infection took more than 160.000 Android devices, which was unheard for this kind of malware.

Apparently, the list of malwares is not limited to only the mentioned ones; we can go on telling about malwares that can track input made on any phone via motion sensors or that focus on only females and this story will never end. But we would like to stop here and ask Google and those who think malware is not a danger — ‘isn’t it high time that certain measures are taken to prevent malware spread?’