Fortinet Announced The Top 5 Malware Families For Android

Posted on Saturday, 17 December 2011 by admin

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Fortinet announced the top 5 families of malware detected by FortiGuard Labs for Android, which have also tested a new vulnerability that affects Android phones at the root level. On 15 November, the analyst firm Gartner has published a report stating that the Android mobile operating system Google has reached a market share of 52.5% of the global smartphone market, followed in third place by IOS (after Symbian ) with a market share of 18%. The FortiGuard Labs have found interesting the disparity between the amount of malware detected in the Android operating system than detected on iOS, relative to the respective market share.

Here are the 5 most important families of malware that FortiGuard Labs found more in 2011:

• Geinimi: the first Android botnet that sends the location of the victim and it controls the phone remotely. For example, Geinimi can force the infected phone to call a given telephone number.
• Hongtoutou: a Trojan horse in the form of live and background subtracts personal information, such as the subscriber number (IMSI) of the victim and visit Web sites automatically imposed by the malware.
• DroidKungFu: another botnet with many capabilities, such as remote installation of other malware, remote booting of specific applications and adding bookmarks.
• JiFake: an instant messaging application that sends SMS to fake pay phone numbers.
• BaseBridge: a Trojan horse that sends text messages to premium-rate numbers.

The FortiGuard Labs have identified a number of families about 5 times more harmful in the Android OS than iPhone OS. We believe that this disparity is attributable to the way Apple handles the development and distribution of iPhone OS applications. Unlike Android, which makes it pretty easy to publish applications that users can download, IOS requires developers to undergo a thorough selection rather than by Apple before the application can arrive at the Apple Store. This does not mean that Apple is completely immune to the infiltration of malware, and the banking worms Eeki is proof, but it is a testament to the low activity of malware on the iPhone OS platform, ‘said Axelle Apvrille, senior mobile anti-virus Fortinet.

We believe that, unfortunately, the highest market share and open development environment of Android have a price, an increase in malware attacks six times the operating system. To date, our Labs found an increase of 90% of malware families for Android in 2011 compared to 2010, while families of malware for IOS only increased by 25%. Of course these statistics do not take into account the rates of infection or hazard, ‘he said Apvrille.

The malware is detected by Fortinet’s antivirus engine. It is also worth noting that the malware as BaseBridge was available on Android Market, but was later removed. Many times, the malware attempts to disguise itself as a legitimate application, but they have been detected even in the presence of valid applications that were infected.

DroidKungFu is an example of malware that was found inside a repackaged Regular VPN utility, while Geinimi has been identified in the self-Sex Positions, said Karine de Ponteves, Malware Analyst at Fortinet.