Alert! Drastic increase in malware attacks in Q2: Here is how to stay safe

There has been a drastic increase in the number of mobile malware threats detected and blocked by Kaspersky solutions in the second quarter of the year when compared to Q1 2020, a recently released report said. The increase noted was around 93232 more threats detected from the period of April to July 2020. In Q2 2020, Kaspersky detected 1,245,894 malicious installers, an increase of 93,232 over the previous quarter. 

According to the report, Adware topped the list with 48%, a decrease of one percentage point from the previous quarter. The Ewind adware family (60.53% of all adware detected) was most common in Q2, followed by the FakeAdBlocker family with 13.14% and Inoco with 10.17%.  

RiskTool-type potentially unwanted software ranked second among all detected threat classes. SMS trojans hold third place among all detected threats with 7.59%.  Agent (33.74%), Fakeinst (26.80%) and Opfake (26.33%) were the largest of the detected families of SMS trojans. All the three families were more common with Russian users, which is typical of the entire SMS trojan threat class. 

The top 3 countries with the largest share of users attacked by mobile malware remained unchanged in Q2: Iran (43.62%) followed by Algeria (21.97%) and Bangladesh (19.30%), India ranked 6th on the list with 13.54% 

How to stay safe? 

1. Keep checking your downloaded applications for the app permissions granted to them, and regularly update or delete the apps according to its usage. 

2. Download the applications only from trusted sources, and look out for signs like battery draining, heating or slowing down of the phone in order to recognize an infection in your phone. 

3. Do not blindly trust people and hand over your phone to anybody without knowing what activities they are using your phone for. 

4. Keep yourselves updated on the various types of threats that can be targeted at you by cybercriminals in order to steal your money and important data.   

5. Install a reliable anti-virus of internet security solution.