The Android security world is often so full of FUD that even great research can get buried behind hyperbolic headlines
The chances are that your device isn’t going to be hacked by Russian super-villains who can now crack the full disk encryption you’ve installed. If you do want to shrink the risk even smaller than it has already shrunk itself, with a little help from Google and Qualcomm, that’s easy enough. Stop using handsets with stupidly old, and insecure, versions of the Android OS.
There are always new reports hitting the inbox here at IT Security Thing, many of them involving the mobile sector, and Android in particular. Most suggest that the Android security ecosystem is screwed, if the number of malware infections are concerned.
Here’s the latest one: Skycure’s new Mobile Threat Intelligence Report reveals “every organization with at least 200 mobile devices, iOS or Android, has at least one malware-infected device, and companies with Android devices are nearly twice as likely to have malware.”
The answer to which is, of course, ensure the proper security systems are in place to prevent such malware infections from hitting the handsets in the first place. These measures include staff awareness training, usage policy and software as well as disaster recovery systems to restore ransomware infected devices for example. This is not the time to get into the whole BYOD security debate, so we’ll leave it there.
The point being that while these reports help to join the dots when it comes to drawing a map of the mobile device threatscape, that map can only ever be two dimensional. There’s no ability to zoom in and magnify a section to see what’s really happening. Mainly because the view is covered in FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt).
