Mobile adware on the rise

    As many of you may know, there are many apps that are not entirely beneficial, most being for andriod phones. Now that so many people have a smart phone, malware creators are starting to focus more and more on making malicious apps. These can not only steal your personall data, or harass you and your friends with spam and ads, it also drains your battery. A recent survey has shown that about 12% of phones run out of battery completely each day. This can be very annoying, and with 60% of people saying that battery life is the main selling point, very costly.

A trend micro study on battery usage

    Adware is now incorporated into many apps, and while most ads are displayed legitimatly, they can now create illigitimate "notifications" or icons, that, when clicked, lead to the advertisers website. Many of these ads also steal your personall info, most of them without any sort of notification that they are doing this. They collect and send data in the background, and burn through your battery life and data usage.

    There are many free antivirus apps that can protect agains most common threats, and also many paid apps. I personally recommend either Sophos mobile security, or ESET's mobile app. They can be found here and here, respectively (Sophos being free, ESET a paid app).

Credits:
Trend Micro

Adware is making a comback

Browser extensions are now being used by adware developers to inject ads into websites. Many Wikipedia users have been complaining of ads being displayed on its site, while Wikimedia has stated that they will not put up adds. Wikimedia is a non-profit and will never display ads on their site, so if you see them, you most likely have a bad browser extension.

Not only do these adware extensions cause annoying ads, some of them are even used for more sinister purposes. One extension mentioned by wikimedai called "IWantThis!" is spyware that is masquerading as adware. In its privacy policy it states:

Examples of the information we may collect and analyze when you use our website include the IP address used to connect your computer to the Internet; login; e-mail address; password; computer and connection information such as browser type, version, and time zone setting, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system, and platform; the full Uniform Resource Locator (URL) clickstream to, through, and from the Site, including date and time; cookie; web pages you viewed or searched for; and the phone number you used to call us.

Some of these extension may come bundled with freeware downloaded from other sites, and be installed involuntarily. Many of these extensions target Chrome as the go to browser, but are very capable of being installed on other browsers as well. Few antivirus software will actually scan or detect faulty or malicious browser extensions so it is up to you to keep yourself secure. Never install toolbars or extensions that promise "free cursors", "free games", etc. Regularly check through your extension/toolbars/addons and disable/remove those that you are not using or did not install. And, as always, do not download or install anything fishy.

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