Russia has become one of the world leaders in the number of hacker threats for users of the Android operating system. This was reported in the company ESET, whose analysts warned the Russians about the most serious potential problems.
In particular, experts found out that from May to August 2021, the total number of malicious Android programs in Russia increased by almost a third (32.6 percent) compared to the beginning of the year. This allowed the country to enter the top 5 countries in the world in terms of hacker threats. Significant growth was also recorded in India, Brazil, Mexico and Ukraine.
ESET specialists separately noted a serious increase in the activity of banking malware and Android applications. The number of such attacks increased by 200 percent over the summer. As an example, analysts cited a fairly widespread in Russia dangerous TrojanDropper.Agent, which began to be downloaded by 18.4 percent more frequently. It is clarified that the virus is able to penetrate the operating system, change internal settings and steal personal data.
Other sources of threats to Android users, the number of which has increased, are spyware (by 71 percent) and Trojans for displaying unwanted ads (by 63 percent). Experts recorded a decrease in cryptomainers (by 14.3 percent) and ransomware (by 7.7 percent).
Earlier, Viktor Chebyshev, a leading researcher of mobile threats at Kaspersky Lab, spoke in an interview with Russian newspaper Izvestia about Android Trojans that automatically interact with banking applications. Trojan that uses the documented capabilities of Android for malicious purposes, which allows it to automatically click buttons in the banking application. According to the expert, 99.9% of mobile financial threats target Android.
