Vulnerability to Hacking
It has been found that the hacking attacks targeting Android-based mobile devices are rapidly diversifying these days. For example, mobile security solution provider 360 Security recently announced that the damage attributable to mobile ransomware amounted to 95.6 billion won worldwide last year and more than 900,000 devices were infected between June 2013 and the first quarter of this year.
The number of rooting attempts is soaring as well. AhnLab collected approximately 46,000 malicious rooting app samples in the first half of this year, about four times that of the second half of last year. AhnLab explained that most of those malicious rooting apps are for information and data theft and ad exposure.
Some experts point out that this can be attributed to the lack of efforts on the part of companies leading the Android ecosystem such as Google. “Security examination is insufficient with regard to app development environments and Google Play registration procedures and this is leading to an increase in the number of insecure apps and fake apps,” one of them mentioned.
According to mobile app security company Seworks, approximately 80% of the applications available on the Google Play store are vulnerable to hacking and 83% of the top 200 free apps are prone to the possibility of decompile-based forgery and falsification. In addition, 95% of popular free apps with native library files and 82% of popular paid apps that have such files are vulnerable to forgery and falsification based on reverse engineering.