Kaspersky Antivirus ranks India as sixth highest in mobile malware attacks

In its report, IT Threat Revolution Q1, 21.53 per cent of all Kaspersky Antivirus users in the country recorded mobile malware attacks.
For representational purposes
For representational purposes

HYDERABAD: In the opening months of 2019, India recorded a huge number of mobile malware attacks, so much so that Kaspersky Antivirus in its first-quarter report ranked the country at sixth among the countries with most such attacks. 

In its report, IT Threat Revolution Q1, 21.53 per cent of all Kaspersky Antivirus users in the country recorded mobile malware attacks. At the helm was neighbours, Pakistan and Bangladesh with 37.54 per cent and 28.83 cent users attacked from January to April.

As for the kind of malware that were used to attack these countries, researchers found that at the top was "DangerousObject.Multi.Generic verdict (54.26%), which we use for malware detected using cloud technologies. Cloud technologies are deployed when the antivirus databases lack data for detecting a piece of malware."

India also figured among the top 3 countries where Apple products were attacked. "Users from Spain (9.75%), India (8.83%), and Italy (8.20%) – who ranked second, third, and fourth, respectively – most often encountered Trojan-Downloader.OSX.Shlayer.a, AdWare .OSX.Spc.a, AdWare.OSX.Bnodlero.q, AdWare.OSX.Pirrit.j, and AdWare.OSX.Agent.b." 

The report found that Trojan-Downloader.OSX.Shlayer.a (24.62%) was the most abundant of the macOS threats. "Malware from the Shlayer family is distributed under the guise of Flash Player or its updates. Their main task is to download and install various advertising apps," it said. 

If that was not enough, the country also figured among the top ten to be attacked by ransomware in the first quarter of the year. With 1.11 per cent users attacked with ransomware trojans, India was at the ninth position. The most common ransomware that was detected was WannaCry, then (generic verdict) and GandCrab. 

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