Mobile Malware on the Rise

IT Business Edge, By Sue Marquette Poremba

Last week, I was looking toward the future and the first tidbits of security-related predictions for 2014. Today, I’m going to look backwards a bit, to see what the security problems of the past few months have been.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the third quarter of 2013 was all about mobile malware. It was only a matter of time until the bad guys put out real effort to go after our mobile devices, and according to Kaspersky Lab, the malware developers went all out over the summer months, creating a whole new bag of tricks. In July, the security experts saw, for the first time, third-party botnets. According to the SecureList blog:

This is how the most sophisticated Android Trojan, known as Obad, was distributed – using mobile devices infected with Trojan-SMS.AndroidOS.Opfake.a. Upon receiving a command from the C&C server, Opfake began sending text messages to all of the victim’s contacts, inviting them to download a new MMS message. If a user who received the text followed the link provided in the message, this resulted in Backdoor.AndroidOS.Obad.a being automatically downloaded onto the device. Read more.