Experts Find 10 Companies are Responsible for 60% of Russian Mobile Malware

Mobile malware is undoubtedly a growing threat has proven have many resilient threats for vulnerable operating systems like Android. Security experts from the firm Lookout have released a study zoning in on the Russian mobile malware demographic where they made the discovery that just 10 companies are responsible for 60% of Russian mobile malware.

Russia is no stranger in being the mother land for initiating a large percentage of malware attacks on computers and mobile devices around the world. Many of the Russian criminal enterprises are well organized and armed with money-hungry hackers.

In an investigation called 'Dragon Lady', Lookout has initiated an effort to look deep into the culprits of Russian-made malware. The report reveals that 10 organizations are responsible for 60% of all Russian malware where most of the organizations focus primarily on toll fraud malware. The toll fraud malware is the biggest earner for the crooks by sending SMS messages to premium rate numbers from infected phones.

In most of the cases of this specific spread of mobile malware rooting out of Russia, victims assume that they are downloading the Angry Birds app for their mobile device, but it is actually a Trojan horse that inflates their bill by sending SMS messages to premium rate numbers. This particular malware campaign's cycle is represented in the infographic Figure 1 image below.

Figure 1. Malware Campaign Life Cycle represented by Russian mobile malware - Source: Lookout

As far as the distribution channels used for these aggressive malware affiliates, Twitter was found to be the main weapon of choice. Because search engines assign such a high value for indexed tweets the crooks are tweeting up a storm to promote their malicious content.

The recent research report exclaims (full report here), 'Lookout combed through 247,863 unique twitter handles and over a million tweets. Nearly 50,000 of the unique handles and nearly 25 percent of all tweets identified were confirmed linking to malware. While many of the accounts were still active, Twitter's security team appeared disable accounts which they identified as malicious.'

Mobile malware continues to thrive and has made many Russian cybercrooks an abundance of money through deceptive methods. Every day we come across situations where mobile malware peddlers are ramping up their efforts to make their attacks. It is always in our best interest to only obtain mobile apps from trusted app stores like Google Play or the App Store instead of 3rd party sources, which are known for having a multitude of apps laced with malware.