In a recent news by Tech Times, it was reported that Google's Android security team identified and put to a halt a sudden rise of mobile banking Trojans in Russia. During his attendance at Virus Bulletin conference, a senior software engineer at Google in the name of Sebastian Porst has recently discussed about the rising mobile banking fraud in Russia. He reportedly stressed that Android security team has successfully in detected and stopped the rising fraud in the mobile banking sector in Q1 of this year.
According to Tech Times, Porst said that many smartphone consumers were targeted by Trojans adding that 86 percent of all mobile banking malware were concentrated in Russia.
Google detects potentially harmful apps (PHA) on smartphones that run the Android operating system and deals with mobile security and safety accordingly. Moreover, it reportedly runs manual and automated analyses of the app submission location, the method through which the app was developed and who submitted those apps.
According to Tech Times, a Quartz report suggests that Russian Android device users are 10 times more susceptible to phishing malware from PHA than the U.S. in which PHA on phones is no greater than 0.4 percent. From March 2015, Google began scanning Android phones for PHA in Russia each day. Prior to that, security scans were conducted only once a week. As a result, more alerts about PHA's were sent to users who, in turn, removed them as soon as possible.
"During 2014, the number of attacks by this Trojan grew steadily, but at the beginning of May 2015 the numbers decreased dramatically, almost to zero," Tech Times quotes Roman Unuchek, a senior malware analyst at Kaspersky Labs.
In the meantime, according to Security Week, Porst reportedly stresses that with the new Android 6.0 Marshmallow has better security features that will safeguard the Android OS from malware attacks and that Google is currently working on a second malware removal campaign.
