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The virus called "SMS Trojans" has been sending SMS texts to premium-rate numbers, causing losses of VND3.9 billion for subscribers every day.— Photo zing.vn
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HA NOI (Biz Hub) — A malware has infected over 20 per cent of smartphones in Viet Nam, draining mobile accounts of thousands of subscribers, stated BKAV, Viet Nam biggest security firm.
The virus called "SMS Trojans" has been sending SMS texts to premium-rate numbers, causing losses of VND3.9 billion for subscribers every day.
According to the recently published BKAV Security Bulletin (No2/ 2014), in the first five months of 2014, BKAV detected 621,000 new malwares, compared to 528,000 in the same period in 2013. Meanwhile, every day, as many as 262,000 smartphones in Viet Nam are being infected with "SMS Trojans causing losses worth VND3.9 billion to phone owners. BKAV's vice president of R&D Vu Ngoc Son, said that since January the company had found 1.8 million applications that contained malwares.
"Hackers are now targeting mobile devices and it would be a huge threat in the future," Son added. The bulletin specifically points fingers at "repackaged copies of legitimate apps distributed via non-official marketplaces" as the main source of malware. — VNS
That means you can relax a little only if you buy your apps from Google Play or Amazon.
Apple has no such non-official marketplaces for phones that aren't jail-broken (i.e. running unofficial versions of iOS), which helps explain the statistical findings.
According to Cisco's 2014 Annual Security Report, 99 per cent of all mobile malware now targets the Google Android operating systems. — VNS