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

Android malware spreads through bogus apps

Android is quickly becoming a very popular OS for malware developers. Android apps can be coded in java, a very simple language that can be picked up by anyone. Recently, many viruses have been created and put up for download on third party android app stores. These "apps" mimic there intended clone but add malware functionality such as connecting to a webpage and waiting for orders. This can cause high wireless web traffic causing your phone bill to go up drastically if you are not so fortunate as to have an unlimited data plan. Let's try to make this a little simpler. Lets say you don't want to pay for angry birds, so you go find someplace to download it free. What you don't know is that this is not only angry birds, but it also has a virus attached. The virus can be so small (under 100kb) that you don't even notice the difference in size. Once angry birds is initialized, your phone connects to a website and awaits further instruction.
Some ways that you can prevent this is by

• Get an Android antivirus (such as Symantec Mobile Security )
• Make sure you trust the source you are downloading from (if it seems too good to be true, it is)
• Download only from the legitimate source (Android marketplace)

As always, post a comment for what I should post about next

Source:

Bogus Facebook apps spreading Android malware : The Hacker News ~ http://thehackernews.com/2012/05/bogus-facebook-apps-spreading-android.html