James Delahunty
29 Aug 2013 18:46
The Department of Homeland Security and FBI sent a memo to U.S. police and emergency services warning about attacks on mobile devices running Android.
According to the memo, over 79 percent of attacks on mobile devices in 2012 were on devices running the Android operating system. Given the popularity of the mobile OS and its open source architecture, it draws more attacks than other operating systems, such as Apple's iOS, which accounted for only 0.7 percent of attacks.
Half of the attacks on Android phones were in the form of so called "text trojans", which are malicious apps that send premium-rate SMS messages in the background. More serious attacks include fake Google Play stores and malware that can steal information and track what a user is doing.
One major issue with Android, according to the memo, is the large portion of devices running unsafe versions of the OS. Roughly 44 percent of Android users were still using Gingerbread, which was released in 2011. The memo notes that a number of serious security vulnerabilities have been fixed in later versions.
"The growing use of mobile devices by federal, state, and local authorities makes it more important than ever to keep mobile OS patched and up-to-date," it said.
Apple claims that 93 percent of iPhones and iPads run iOS 6.