By: Sarah Silbert, LAPTOP Magazine
1. Ads and TOS agreements
One popular way for malware writers to siphon money from your smartphone or tablet is to insert malicious ads and Term of Service (TOS) agreements into apps.
“In 99 percent of the SMS malware we see, apps actually request the permission to send text messages,” said Tim Armstrong, malware analyst for Kaspersky Lab. “People are just so conditioned to click through all these screens just to get to the end of the install that they don’t review any of the permissions, and a lot of times they’re giving away the right to charge them money.”