US authorities have brought into notice that around 79% of malicious attacks on mobiles were seen on devices running Google’s Android operating system in the previous year.
The US police was submitted the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation memo by the public information website Public Intelligence.
The memo says that: Nokia’s Symbian system, on the Finnish company’s basic-feature handsets, had had the second-most malware attacks. Apple’s iOS had had 0.7% of attacks.
Today, Android is the world’s most popular mobile operating system. The memo puts the blame of this attack on the “market share and open-source architecture”.
It was further brought to light that half of the Android that attacked the older versions of the system were sent via text trojans – malware. It used to send SMS messages to premium-rate numbers without the phone owners’ knowledge and infect it.
The memo also described about certain fake sites that looks like the Google’s Play marketplace and “rootkits”, thus making it open for hackers to track user’s keystrokes and passwords.
The memo researched that almost 44% of Android users are still using older versions of the operating system, specifically 2.3.3 through 2.3.7, dubbed Gingerbread that was released in 2011.
The memo also notified about the number of security vulnerabilities that were fixed in later versions.
“The growing use of mobile devices by federal, state, and local authorities makes it more important than ever to keep mobile OS patched and up-to-date,” it added.
‘Master key’ exploited
More than 93% of the 600 million iPhones and iPads sold by Apple run on the most recent version of the operating system i.e. iOS 6. The next version is expected a soon release next month.
Well, this is not actually the first time the open nature of Google’s popular phone software is being subjected to questioning. Security firm Symantec reported of an exploit in China last month. It mentioned about a “master key” bug that allowed attackers to take control of Android phones.
Akshay Agarwal
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