South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya, Android platform is increasingly becoming insecure, warns Kaspersky Lab
The African market has registered the fastest growth of the use of mobile phones compared to other world markets. With the advent of smartphones into the scene, the Android OS has had a good run, mainly attributed to the fact that most cheap smartphones run on it.
But with the increased innovation and customer service enhancement by telecom companies; such as mobile money and mobile banking, this has led to a new frontier of online insecurity and spying. The quick uptake and widespread use of Android smartphones across the African continent has only served to render more users vulnerable to online insecurity.
Especially considering that many users don’t take the necessary security measure to protect themselves. Most smartphone users don’t look at their smartphones as they look at their computers, completely disregarding that they are increasingly using their smartphones for business transactions and storing sensitive data.
It is this negligence that has led to infectors shifting their attention from just developing spyware and malware for computers to now developing the same for smartphones. The android platform has become more lucrative to them since it is the most widely used OS for smartphones in Africa and the world at large.
A report dubbed: Kaspersky Lab & INTERPOL Report: Every Fifth Android User Faces Cyber-Attacks was tabled through a collaboration between Kaspersky Lab and INTERPOL, talks about the increasing vulnerability of smartphone users on the Android platform. The two conducted a “Mobile cyber-threats” survey between August 2013 and July 2014 and raised the following security concerns Africa, especially South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya:
“A total of 1,000,000 Android device users around the world encountered dangerous software between August 2013 and July 2014, representing about one fifth of all Kaspersky Lab mobile product users. In fact, this period was the peak of cyber-attacks registered in recent years.
Among African countries, Kaspersky Lab registered almost a similar number of mobile malware attacks in South Africa and in Nigeria, some less in Kenya. In South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria the top 3 most active malware types look a bit different: RiskTool leads followed with quite a distance by Trojan-SMS, after which goes AdWare,” – said, the report.
To address the increasing security vulnerability, Kaspersky Lab has released a multi-device internet protection solution; using just one licence across a maximum of three different devices. The company has urged smartphone users to look upon their smartphones as would their computers.
Smartphone users need to install antivirus and anti-spyware and be just as cautious about online security as they are while they are on their computers.