Malware Vulnerability for Android; Increasing?

According to security firm McAfee, mobile malware has made its way in other parts of the world. McAfee discovered almost 700,000 new variants of malware aimed at Android-based mobile devices.

While the Google Play store continues to weed out most malware, countries in the Asia-Pacific region, where McAfee counts a significant number of its mobile-security users, have a far greater problem with infections, Mike Fey, chief of technological officer for McAfee, told eWeek. Approximately 7 percent of all users in the APAC region had a device attacked by malware each month, he said.

McAfee's Q3 threat report noted an ongoing increase in the number of malware of samples that use a digital signature to attempt to evade operating systems' defenses. More than 1.5 million samples, nearly 8 percent of the total, were signed using a digital signature.

The amount of malware aimed at computers running Mac OS X grew at the same rate as the previous quarter, with only about 300 new threats detected in Q3, according to McAfee's report.