McAfee has recently released its third quarter security report and the results are a bit surprising. The Intel owned company reports that malware targeting the Android platform is still on the rise. The Google championed OS is solidly in the lead as the most targeted mobile platform.
McAfee's third quarter security reports puts mobile malware targeting Android up 37 percent since last quarter. That's quite a significant leap. Their second quarter security report actually had Android malware up 76 percent from the previous quarter. The security company is reporting that all new mobile malware is targeting Android. So every single new mobile virus or exploit went after Android.
The jump in malware overall quarter-to-quarter is causing McAfee to increase their overall 2011 projections from 70 million unique, new pieces of malware up to 75 million. If those projections hold up it would make 2011 the busiest year in malware by a clear margin.
It seems that hackers are going after Android devices because of the sheer quantity of them out there. One of the most popular forms of malware nastiness in Q3 involves Trojans that send SMS messages with personal information or payment information. Another new, and particularly nefarious technique was to have the device record phone conversations and forward them out to a centralized location.
The Q3 security report also details that other forms of attack like Fake AntiVirus are mounting a comeback from the previous quarter. Things like AutoRun and password stealing Trojans maintained relatively constant levels since Q2. Mac OS X malware is also still on the rise but not at as steep a rate as Q2.
These types of reports are interesting because McAfee goes into fairly specific detail on each security risk and breaks things down by geographic regions of the world. Have any of you folks fallen prey to a piece of Android malware yet? I'm personally hearing more complaints from friends/family about their Facebook accounts than mobile malware, but those numbers don't lie.
