Time to time, we have been hearing about Google’s Android being vulnerable to all kinds of security threats. Despite Google adopting several ways to make one of the world’s most popular platform secure, hackers with malicious intentions tend to break through all security firewalls end up achieving their goals. Nokia has also confirmed the same in a recent study.
NetGuard, owned by Nokia, has done a study collecting statistics from around 100 million devices in several countries across the world. They found that around 68 percent of all devices that were affected by malware attacks last year belong to the word of Android. Apple’s iOS had a remarkable figure of only 3 percent, showing the Cupertino giant’s efforts to keep its platform safe and secure. Even the Windows platform fared better at 28 percent.
Nokia’s study also revealed that the proportion of Android devices infected per month on an average this year was 0.94 percent, which is not even close to Google’s 2016 figure of 0.71 percent. Nokia states that the overall infection rate for all mobile devices was 0.68 percent and Windows devices using dongles or tethered connections from mobile phones had an infection rate of 0.2 percent.
"The Android platform is the most highly targeted by cybercriminals. Google has done an excellent job with Google Play Protect and they're really securing the app infrastructure for the Android devices. The main threat vector for Android phones is trojanised apps. In the Android space, Google has tried to address this by doing a good job securing Google Play," Kevin McNamee, director of Nokia's Alcatel-Lucent Kindsight Security Labs told ZDNet in an interview.
One of the other major reasons pointed out for Android’s bad score was the presence of several other third-party app stores. Several major software players such Amazon, Samsung, Tencent, Baidu along with new players from China such as Qihoo 360 and Xioami have also ventured into the app store territory for their own mobile ecosystems based on Android. While Google’s Play Protect security services have employed a robust security firewall for the Google PlayStore, the same hasn’t been done by these third-party app stores, resulting in the distribution of malicious apps on a considerable number of devices.
Google faces a bigger issue of implementing its security services on several devices that aren’t using Google’s version of Android and unless other device manufacturers comply with the new security implementations, Android’s security efforts will always be compromised.
