Recent analysis of mobile malware for Android OS showed that the most popular targets among cyber criminals were Android versions 2.3.6, or 'Gingerbread', and 4.0.4, also known as 'Ice Cream Sandwich'.
According to Kaspersky Lab, the rapid growth in the number of new mobile malicious programs for Android continued in the third quarter and 2.3.6 Gingerbread accounted for 28% of all blocked attempts to install malware, with Ice Cream Sandwich hot on its heels at 22% of attempts.
Yuri Namestnikov, senior malware analyst at Kaspersky Lab, says even though Gingerbread was released as far back as September last year, the segmentation of the Android device market has ensured it remains one of the most popular versions, which, in turn, attracts increased interest from cyber criminals.
In addition, he said, Ice Cream Sandwich's popularity among virus writers could be explained by the fact that the devices running the latest versions of the OS are more suitable for online activities.
"Unfortunately, users actively surfing the Web often end up on malicious sites," he adds.
Generally speaking, he said, over 50% of all malware detected on user smartphones turned out to be SMS Trojans that steal money from victims' mobile accounts by sending SMS messages to premium rate numbers.
"The OpFake family has become the most widespread, 38.3% of all malware detected for Android among all the mobile malware families. All the programmes in this family disguise themselves as OperaMini," adds Namestnikov.
He added that one fifth of the malicious programs detected on user devices are versatile Trojans, most of which belong to the Plangton family.
"After being installed on a device, these Trojans collect service data on the telephone, send it to the command server and wait for the cyber criminals' commands" he notes.
Namestnikov says this family of malware can stealthily change bookmarks and the home page. Coming third was the FakeInst family, whose members pretend to be installers for popular programs.
"These two types of malware are mostly distributed via so-called alternative app stores created by cyber criminals," he concludes.
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