There is bad news coming from Asia as according to the statistics provided by Secure-D, a platform dedicated to combating fraud by Upstream, mobile malware has been on the rise during the third quarter of 2020 in the region.
Starting off with their claims, Secure-D marked 97% of the mobile transactions as fraudulent and unfortunately, Indonesia is that one place where the malicious app activity is almost uncontrollable with 98% of fraudulent transactions from a total of 164 million. To look at it from another perspective, then the figures coming from Indonesia also comprise 64% of the total transactions that Secure-D blocked all around the world during the quarter.
There are more shocking revelations surrounding the similar figures as it is also 5 times more than the number of platforms blocked in the country in the similar quarter of 2019 and 3 times more than Q2 of 2020.
Ten of the most offending apps mentioned in the list belonged to the Android apps store and around 310,000 consumers in Indonesia were carrying the malware on their devices. The number of these malicious mobile apps even doubled this year as compared to the previous one.
Furthermore, Indonesia isn’t the only country that has been serving as safe heaven as Malaysia also saw a 30% rise in blocked transactions whereas UAE had a 16% increase, along with Thailand too on the list.
Geoffrey Cleaves, Head of Secure-D at Upstream, has put the blame on the pandemic. According to him, more people are now dependent on their smartphones for work or to pass their time and as a result, bad actors are taking advantage of the opportunity to publish more malicious apps on the Play Store which will eventually blind users into purchasing subscriptions or premium content.
All of the MEIZU apps like com.meizu.safe, com.meizu.assistant, com.meizu.flyme.weather and com.meizu.flyme.launcher initiated the highest number of suspicious transactions - 45 million to be exact.
Russia too is handling higher rates of fraudulent transactions as the numbers have gone up from 66% in Q2 to 94% in the third quarter of 2020.
Read next: According to Google's Data, over 2 Million phishing websites emerged in 2020
Starting off with their claims, Secure-D marked 97% of the mobile transactions as fraudulent and unfortunately, Indonesia is that one place where the malicious app activity is almost uncontrollable with 98% of fraudulent transactions from a total of 164 million. To look at it from another perspective, then the figures coming from Indonesia also comprise 64% of the total transactions that Secure-D blocked all around the world during the quarter.
There are more shocking revelations surrounding the similar figures as it is also 5 times more than the number of platforms blocked in the country in the similar quarter of 2019 and 3 times more than Q2 of 2020.
Ten of the most offending apps mentioned in the list belonged to the Android apps store and around 310,000 consumers in Indonesia were carrying the malware on their devices. The number of these malicious mobile apps even doubled this year as compared to the previous one.
Furthermore, Indonesia isn’t the only country that has been serving as safe heaven as Malaysia also saw a 30% rise in blocked transactions whereas UAE had a 16% increase, along with Thailand too on the list.
Geoffrey Cleaves, Head of Secure-D at Upstream, has put the blame on the pandemic. According to him, more people are now dependent on their smartphones for work or to pass their time and as a result, bad actors are taking advantage of the opportunity to publish more malicious apps on the Play Store which will eventually blind users into purchasing subscriptions or premium content.
All of the MEIZU apps like com.meizu.safe, com.meizu.assistant, com.meizu.flyme.weather and com.meizu.flyme.launcher initiated the highest number of suspicious transactions - 45 million to be exact.
Russia too is handling higher rates of fraudulent transactions as the numbers have gone up from 66% in Q2 to 94% in the third quarter of 2020.
Read next: According to Google's Data, over 2 Million phishing websites emerged in 2020
