U.S. Government Finds 0.7% of All Mobile Malware Affects iOS, While Android Accounts for 79%

That's a large percentage gap there

Technology • August 2013 • Views: 2,000

A cautionary memo put out by the US Department of Homeland Security and the US Department of Justice shows that, according to the government’s findings, only 0.7 percent of all mobile malware is designed to take advantage of iOS. This figure is in stark contrast to the Android OS, which the memo reports accounts for 79 percent of mobile malware threats. The release was published by the website Public Intelligence.

More: U.S. Government Finds 0.7% of All Mobile Malware Affects iOS, While Android Accounts for 79%

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7 comments

KiTA Mon, Aug 26, 2013 7:06:42pm

Relevent XKCD:

xkcd.com

Prononymous, rogue demon hunter Mon, Aug 26, 2013 8:40:48pm

Without Michael’s commentary I can only conclude that he is trying to get us all to buy windows mobile and blackberry phones. They are over twice as safe as iOS and 263 times safer than Android! Right?

Frankly the take home message, if you read the link, is that you should keep your software up to date. Old versions of Android had a significant number of vulnerabilities that were subsequently patched.

It is true that it will be easier to find bugs and thus develop malware for an open platform. But it is also true that it will be easier to find and patch the holes. And you can do it without waiting for carriers or apple/google/MS/RIM to push out an update. Another aspect is that there are more ways of dealing with malware on an open platform. If I got malware on my phone I could easily blow away the OS and reload from a known good rom (among many other possibilities). But how would you deal with malware on iOS if there isn’t an app that can help? Send it to Apple?

Velvet Elvis Tue, Aug 27, 2013 12:19:41am

The platform with the highest market share will always ahve the most malware. That’s why there is more for Windows than there is for OSX and linux.

MichaelJ Tue, Aug 27, 2013 3:31:45pm

It might be worth noting that iOS market share in 2012 was significantly higher than 0.7% and Android market share was significantly less than 79%.

Prononymous, rogue demon hunter Tue, Aug 27, 2013 3:58:30pm

re: #4 MichaelJ

That’s a good point Michael and it really underscores how useless this chart is. Without actual numbers of malware it is easy to misjudge a percentage. What really matters is the numbers of phones infected not the number of malware programs written for them. Infection rates depend highly on how rapidly updates were pushed out by the carriers (which is why I hate this business model, I want to be able to apply a patch as soon as it is made not having to wait for some 3rd party).

And as you say it is quite odd that most of the malware was written for an os version that was never in a dominant market position. Barring data on infection rates I would at least want to see malware broken down by OS version.

Anyway, the message should be the same regardless of which OS you run. Do backups, keep your software up to date (Not just your OS but apps too), and have a plan for if your phone gets infected. Every major mobile OS now has at least some malware made for it, every OS has undiscovered flaws, and malware writers will continue to find and exploit them. The security battle that has been raging on servers and PCs for decades is now going to rapidly heat up in the mobile sphere.

MichaelJ Wed, Aug 28, 2013 8:30:08am

re: #5 Prononymous, rogue demon hunter

I don’t think the chart is useless, actually. It clearly shows that it is far easier to write malware for a platform that is fragmented, like Android. With all of the various carriers and manufacturers modifying the OS and lagging behind in rolling out updates or in some cases not even releasing updates for some phone models that are still current, there are far more opportunities for exploitation. Another consideration is the fact that Android has captured the low end of the market and not all smartphone buyers in that space will be tech savvy enough to be on top of these kinds of issues. In other words, even more opportunities to exploit.

Industry reporting indicates 44 percent of Android users are still using versions 2.3.3 through 2.3.7-known as Gingerbread-which were released in 2011 and have a number of security vulnerabilities that were fixed in later versions.

Prononymous, rogue demon hunter Wed, Aug 28, 2013 1:42:55pm

re: #6 MichaelJ

I already agreed that it would be easier to develop malware for an open platform. All you have to do is look through the source code for bugs.

What you didn’t acknowledge is that it is also easier to develop fixes for an open platform because white hat individuals can also look through the code.

Old versions of Android and iOS both have security holes that were fixed in newer versions. But only one of those lets the community do something about it if an official update for your device hasn’t been pushed out.

And yes, the chart is fairly useless. It doesn’t tell us anything about how much malware is made by OS version. And it doesn’t tell us anything about infection rates and numbers. Old Apple phones are much more common than old Android phones. So while there might be more malware for Android, all it would take is one effective piece of malware for the number of vulnerable iOS phones to vastly outnumber the number of vulnerable Android phones.

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