Mobile cyberattacks soar, especially against Android users

Attackers are increasingly targeting users through their mobile devices, attacking vulnerabilities in services that are built into applications and mounting increasing numbers of SMS phishing attacks.

That’s according to mobile security firm Zimperium’s 2023 “Global Mobile Threat Report,” which also found that the average number of unique mobile malware samples grew 51% in 2022, totaling an average of 77,000 unique malware samples found every month. About a quarter of application samples submitted to public repositories — 23% of Android apps and 24% of iOS apps — were malicious, according to data in the report.

In total, that all contributed to the number of compromised devices nearly tripling (up 187%) in the time period, because the tactics are working: The company saw an average of four malicious phishing links clicked per device, for instance.

The trend comes as companies and their workers rely increasingly on mobile devices, with a majority of firms seeing more workers (58%) using mobile devices for business than in 2021 and most users (59%) doing more work with their mobile devices, according to the 2022 “Verizon Mobile Security Index” report.

“Businesses and users need to mostly be concerned about mobile phishing and spyware today, and mobile ransomware will become increasingly concerning in the near future,” says JT Keating, senior vice president of strategic initiatives at Zimperium.

Android, iOS Devices See Different Levels of Cyber Threats

About 80% of phishing sites specifically target mobile devices with content suited to those platforms, Zimperium stated in its 2023 “Global Mobile Threat Report.” But, as has been the case for many years, the Android platform tends to attract more threats. One of the reasons for that could be that the Android operating system has seen between about 500 and 900 vulnerabilities disclosed per year that threat actors can target; iOS meanwhile saw a little more than 300 vulnerabilities in five of the last eight years, according to Zimperium.

Another reason that Android is a bigger target? App development mistakes. The firm found that there are more mistakes made in the process of developing apps when it comes to Android, particularly when it comes to how those apps interact with cloud storage instances. Only about 2% of iOS applications access unprotected cloud instances, while 10% of Android apps do so. These include database instances accessed through Google Firebase and Cloud Platform, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), and Microsoft Azure Cloud Storage, according to Zimperium’s report. As a corollary, developers also tend to access the same poor resources, too: Only 1% of unprotected cloud instances accounted for 60% of applications at risk, the company said.

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