Security News > 2022 > June > Latest Mobile Malware Report Suggests On-Device Fraud is on the Rise

An analysis of the mobile threat landscape in 2022 shows that Spain and Turkey are the most targeted countries for malware campaigns, even as a mix of new and existing banking trojans are increasingly targeting Android devices to conduct on-device fraud.

"Just in the first five months of 2022 there has been an increase of more than 40% in malware families that abuse Android OS to perform fraud using the device itself, making it almost impossible to detect them using traditional fraud scoring engines."

Accompanying this trend is the continued discovery of new dropper apps on Google Play Store that come under the guise of seemingly innocuous productivity and utility applications to distribute the malware -.

ERMAC, which emerged last September, has received noticeable upgrades of its own that allow it to siphon seed phrases from different cryptocurrency wallet apps in an automated fashion by taking advantage of Android's Accessibility Service.

The tech giant is going a step further in Android 13, which is currently in beta, by restricting API access for apps that the user has sideloaded from outside of an app store, effectively making it harder for potentially harmful apps to misuse the service.

"The openness of Android OS serves both good and bad as malware continues to abuse the legitimate features, whilst upcoming restrictions seem to hardly interfere with the malicious intentions of such apps," the researchers said.

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https://thehackernews.com/2022/05/latest-mobile-malware-report-suggests.html