SMARTPHONE users have been warned about the escalating threat of hackers after more than 10 million devices were affected last year.
Cyber crooks have jumped at the chance to exploit our growing dependence on technology, especially after the pandemic.
So much so, almost a quarter of mobile devices across the world encountered some form of malicious app in 2021, according to Zimperium zLabs.
Experts detected more than two million new types of mobile malware last year.
The number is actually down 50 per cent on 2020 which was the “year of big changes”, as droves of people were forced into lockdown and many moved to working from home.
But this hasn’t stopped hackers from finding new tricks and scamming victims out of their hard earned cash.
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Zero-day, in the wild, exploits – vulnerabilities detected in actual attacks which no-one was aware of before being hit – shot up by 466 per cent.
“2021 experienced far less change and disruption to everyday life, and the novel impact of the previous year’s news wore off, forcing malicious actors to focus on more effective exploits and attacks,” the 2022 Global Mobile Threat Report says.
“Threat actors have invested heavily in sophisticated frameworks in 2021, like Flutter, Cordova, and Unity, over traditional code from years past.”
Phishing sites, which rip off familiar names and brands in an attempt to fool people, also remain a massive threat to mobile users.
The team looked at more than 500,000 dodgy pages and discovered that the amount specifically aimed at mobiles increased by 50 per cent.
And it looks like people can no longer rely on HTTPS for a sign of safety either.
The extension of the traditional HTTP you see in web addresses is meant to signal secure communication, but researchers found an increase in phishing sites using it.
This makes it even trickier for users to tell the difference between a bogus site and a genuine one.
Zimperium’s Richard Melick said: “These findings illustrate why 2022 must be the year that security teams start to take mobile security seriously, and employ the same rigor in this arena that they’ve been applying to traditional endpoints.”
Common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) were detected for both major operating systems, with 357 reported on iOS and 574 on Android.
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