intelligent MOBILE SECURITY |
imperium – a mobile security
Z platform purpose-built for enterprise environments – has published new research detailing the increasing risk financial institutions and consumers worldwide face due to Trojan horse malware targeting mobile applications . This new report titled , Mobile Banking Heists : The Global Economic Threat , examines more than 600 financial apps – which account for more than 1 billion downloads worldwide – and the degree to which 10 prolific banking Trojan families target them . The report provides an audit of who these trojans target , how they ’ re deployed , how they work and which countries are most impacted .
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“ Not every Trojan targeting mobile and banking apps is created equal – they ’ re disseminated differently , use different exploitation techniques and vary in other degrees of reach and sophistication ,” said Nico Chiaraviglio , VP of Security Research at Zimperium . “ We ’ ve seen ad hoc reports of different banking Trojans over the past few years and , anecdotally , people may have recognised that they ’ re increasing in scope and frequency . But until now , no one has taken a step back to analyse and understand the big picture . That ’ s exactly what our Zimperium zLabs mobile threat research team has done .”
In addition to a detailed examination of 10 major banking Trojan families
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• The most targeted mobile banking application is ‘ BBVA Spain | Online Banking ’ with over 10 million downloads . This one application is targeted by six of the 10 reported banking Trojans .
• In the US , 121 financial applications are being targeted by banking Trojans , accounting for more than 286,753,500 downloads . The UK and Italy are the next most-targeted countries with 55 and 43 apps targeted , respectively .
• The top three mobile financial apps targeted by Trojans focus on mobile payments and alternative asset investments , like cryptocurrency and gold . These three apps account for over 200,000,000 downloads globally .
• The most prolific family of banking Trojan is Teabot , which is being used to target 410 of the applications listed in the report .
Zimperium ’ s research team analyses several hundred thousand applications each day , with state-of-the-art Machine Learning models and other proprietary techniques . The samples covered in this report were collected and classified using this methodology . u
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