ITworld: Android malware is fastest-growing category in IT (and anti-virus apps barely slow it down)

Two-thirds of Android A/V apps don't detect most malware, which increased by 3,325% last year

By Kevin Fogarty
March 08, 2012

There's good news on the mobile-malware front, but only if you're in the mobile malware business: Not only did the number of attacks on mobile devices of all kinds grow by 155 percent compared to 2010, Android, increased the number of its available viruses, Trojans and other malware at the unheard-of rate of 3,325 percent according to a report from Juniper Networks.

German testing lab AV-Test makes the estimate a little more precise, avoiding the question of how to calculate the growth rate in percentages when starting from zero: In January 2011 testers were able to collect almost no malware in the wild that was tailored specifically to Android. By the end of February 2012 the catalog of Android malware apps had grown to nearly 12,000.

More good news (if you write or distribute malware for a living): After testing 41 antivirus/antimalware apps that run on Android, AV-Test concluded that barely a third performed adequately and almost none lived up to the standards most users would expect of a standard antivirus product for PCs.

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