Droppers keep haunting. It spreads viruses on Android

Droppers are most often spread through unofficial stores for the Android operating system, but they can also be spread through links on discussion forums and social networks. As a rule, they are implemented in the installation package of some legitimate program. They have only one job and that is to install more malicious code on the device.

In the ranking of the ten most widespread malicious codes for the Android operating system, droppers occupied six places.

Nevertheless, the absolute primacy belongs to the malicious code Andreed, which belongs to the category of adware. Therefore, the attackers do not try to steal any sensitive data through it, but they display excessive advertising on the attacked machine, from which they subsequently profit. Adware attacks are not as devastating as ransomware attacks, but they can still make using phones and tablets very unpleasant.

“At the end of last year, malicious advertising spread again mainly through mobile games, regardless of the age of the users. In December, security specialists discovered it, for example, in a version of the Bridge Constructor game,” warned Martin Jirkal, head of the analytical team at Eset’s Prague branch.

The second place in the ranking of the most widespread threats for mobile devices with Android was represented by the Trojan horse Agent.KEQ, which people usually installed on their devices together with an illegal version of a game or other software.

At the same time, security specialists point out that threats to the Android platform change the fastest compared to other monitored operating systems. “Thus, we expect to encounter a number of other malicious codes during the course of the year, which may eventually be present in the Czech environment for a long time,” warned the security expert.

“As we have already seen in previous years, we can, for example, count on short-term attack campaigns of various backdoors or malware targeting user passwords. It is not even excluded that a new type of tracking application will appear that violates the privacy of users, as we have observed in the past, for example, with stalkerware,” Jirkal concluded.

In the table below, you can find a ranking of the ten malicious codes from the antivirus company Eset, which users from the Czech Republic encountered most often within the Android operating system in the past month: