As the popularity of the Android OS grows, powering not only phones but increasingly tablets, TV boxes, and a host of other IoT devices; its rapidly increasing install base becomes a double-edged sword. The Android platform has become quite ubiquitous globally, but, as a result, it has also become a magnet for malware developers and those bad actors and hackers who are keen on breaching its App store security in order to gain access to personal information, to execute phishing attacks and, in general, to cause headaches to users. This is also why it comes as no surprise when an article showed up a couple of days ago on SlashGear that highlighted that there were a number of Google Play Store apps, that had been downloaded by users over 4 million times, which were found to have been rife with malware and phishing scams built into them.
In this case, almost 30 Android apps found on the Play Store were found to be using a number of malicious tactics such as making it difficult for users to uninstall, displaying full-screen pop-up ads that linked to explicit content, downloading a paid media player, collecting personal information like addresses and phone numbers, along with containing embedded malware and executing phishing scams.
Mobile devices have always been more susceptible to security attacks due to their lower powered computing nature and the inability, or unwillingness, of users to run endpoint protection in order to save battery life. This is being compounded by the increasing number of IoT devices that are now connecting to the cloud with the same level of computing power as mobile devices and the same inability to protect themselves.
With the increased risk, how do we ensure data security for mobile phones and safety for IoT devices on such an omnipresent platform? That is where the likes of Wedge Networks comes in. One of the key values that Wedge products offer is the ability to protect heterogeneous computing devices (those with a wide variety of different operating systems), detecting and blocking malware, zero days and APTs in the service provider networks and data centers, in real-time before they hit these devices.
Wedge has been developing deep-learning based antimalware for heterogeneous computing devices such as Windows, Unix/Linux, Android, iOS, etc. It has been working with world leading threat intelligence OEM partners, and universities in developing and embedding advanced real-time malware detection and blocking in its products. The security case of the Google Play store tells us such ability to ensure security and safety for mobile/IoT devices are critical.
