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 sixth among nations most affected. As per the cybersecurity firm’s report ‘IT Threat Revolution Q1’, more than one out of five - or 21.53 per cent - Kaspersky Antivirus users in India faced mobile malware attacks. Pakistan topped the list, with 37.54 per cent of users being victims between January and April. Bangladesh too, with a corresponding figure of 28.83 per cent, was worse affected than India.
As for the kind of malware used to attack these countries, Kaspersky Antivirus said 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 three countries in which 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 said.
It added that Trojan-Downloader.OSX.Shlayer.a (24.62%) was the most widespread macOS threat. “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 10 countries to be attacked by ransomware in the first quarter of the year. With 1.11 per cent of users attacked by ransomware trojans, India took the ninth position. The most common ransomware detected was WannaCry.