In November, the tech giant acknowledged that potentially harmful apps may exist on its Google Play Store marketplace. “The Android ecosystem is thriving with over 2.5 billion devices,” Google wrote in a blog post, “but this popularity also makes it an attractive target for abuse.”
To be sure, Google’s platform is far from the only target for scammers. As Google noted, “Where there is software with worldwide proliferation, there are bad actors trying to attack it for their gain.”
Still, Android is uniquely vulnerable given the platform’s size, its scattered manufacturing processes and the difficulty of ensuring universal software updates, reports Forbes. UK security software firm Sophos said in a recent report (PDF) that it has seen cyber attacks on smartphone owners grow more varied over the past year. The top worry, according to the report, is malware, “primarily (though not exclusively) on the Android platform.”
To address the malware concern, Google recently announced the App Defense Alliance, a new partnership with three antivirus firms: ESET, Lookout and Zimperium. “On the malware side we haven’t really had a way to scale as much as we’ve wanted to scale,” said Dave Kleidermacher, Google’s vice president of Android security and privacy, speaking with Wired. “What the App Defense Alliance enables us to do is take the open ecosystem approach to the next level.”
Users of Apple’s iPhone devices aren’t immune from cyber threats, either. While Apple bans antivirus programs from its iPhone App Store on the logic that the platform is engineered with security in mind, Vice reports that a new app called iVerify claims it can alert people if their iPhones have been hacked.
A larger security risk, of course, remains the users of these devices and not the phones themselves, as recently illustrated by one high profile user. As NBC News recently reported, Rudy Giuliani had to take his phone to an Apple Store to be unlocked after forgetting his passcode less than a month after President Trump hired the former New York mayor as a cybersecurity advisor in January 2017.