New Delhi: India is not only home to one of the largest smartphone userbase, but also the second most affected in terms of Android malware with close to one million devices being infected in 2015, a report by Cheetah Mobile Security today said.
The report also says, more than 60 percent of viruses are related to mobile payment. These viruses have been luring customers to enter their banking credentials including bank account and ID information in guise of normal payment pages.
In 2015, over 800,000 Android users were affected by malicious promotion malwares, while mobile payment viruses caused information losses to more than 300,000 users.
Privacy theft Trojan is a common one amongst these malware, which hides in mobile users to steal text messages, contact information, location and personal photos. Root Trojans, which take full control of the device and are very tough to remove, also grew in 2015.
As it gains system-level privilege, Root Trojans can take complete control of the device and are very hard to remove. A Trojan horse or Trojan is a type of malware that is often disguised as legitimate software.
Ghost Push Trojan affected most mobile users (148,920) last year, This virus will install unwanted and annoying apps on your phone and cannot be removed easily even by doing a factory reset or using normal antivirus software.
The second most widespread Trojan was Fakegupt that affected 110,671 devices, it's an adware that creates unnecessary pop ups in the system.
As many as 61,552 user became victim of the deadly Trojan- Xolo-cell becoming the third largest , once it gets installed in the device, it automatically starts sending messages without user's knowledge.
India trails only China, which had 1.5 million infected devices last year. Other countries with high infection rates included Indonesia (8,00,327 devices), Russia (4,63,385), Malaysia, Mexico, the US (3,22,833), Vietnam, the Philippines and Iran.
According to the Cheetah Mobile report, more than 55 per cent Android users have been affected by malicious promotion malware, popping up either as advertisements or forced installations of unwanted apps.
Apart from large Android user bases, another reason of these countries becoming the worst-hit ones is that third-party app markets are prevailing in these areas, and most of these third-party app markets have been contaminated by malwares due to the weak monitoring
