An Apple iOS-based malware came up on Nokia’s top malware 20 list for the first time. According to the latest Threat Intelligence Lab report by Nokia, it was due to XcodeGhost and FlexiSpy.
During the second half of 2015, the iPhone malware represented 6% of the total infections.
“That is a significant increase from before,” stated the director of the Nokia Threat Intelligence Lab Kevin McNamee.
“It is no longer just Androids that are at risk; the iPhones are also at risk,” McNamee said.
“A big danger from the iPhone space is that there is a vulnerability in the operating system, so with a network-based breach iPhones are defenseless; they don’t have the antivirus type of applications that the Android system has. Though they haven’t had problems up until now, if they do get breached it could be quite serious,” explained McNamee.
To make their report, Nokia collected data from networks where its malware detection technology is deployed, covering more than 100 million devices.
According to the same report, alongside the Apple malware, Android malware keeps going strong, more than doubling during the last six months of 2015.
These days, mobile malware is becoming more sophisticated in the techniques it uses to persist on the device. Nokia has recently observed malware which is really hard to uninstall and can even survive a factory reset.
Apart from all the above-mentioned, ransomware is currently a rising mobile threat. For instance, ransomware, like CryptoLocker, has been around for a while on Windows PCs, but last year saw several varieties attacking Android. According to the malware security report, the recovery can only be achieved by paying the hacker a ransom fee via a prepaid cash voucher or with bitcoins.
