According to a recent report by Trend Micro Research, Italy would even be the fifth country in the world with the most attacks on Android.
Trend Micro Research is the division of Trend Micro specializing in research & development and the fight against cybercrime, and found that in May, 427,961 malware designed specifically for the Android operating system were released worldwide, an increase of 3.6% over the previous month.
The most affected country is Japan, followed by India, Indonesia, Taiwan, and Italy in fifth place.
It should be noted that Italy is also the first non-Asian country, since all four countries before it are Asian countries, with three from the Far East.
To be more specific, more than half of these attacks (54%) were detected in Japan, with 8.5% in India, 6.7% in Indonesia and 4.7% in Taiwan, while only 2.5% occurred in Italy.
In addition, Japan has more than 100 million inhabitants, while India has more than 1.3 billion and Indonesia more than 270 million. Taiwan instead has a little more than half of the inhabitants of Italy.
Data from direct attacks on Android systems was collected using Trend Micro’s Mobile Application Reputation Services (MARS) technology, a cloud-based service that automatically identifies threats based on application behaviour, analyzing their code and the websites they connect to.
Trend Micro is a well-known global cybersecurity company with solutions for individuals, businesses, and governments, based on the XGen™ security strategy to provide security for data centres, cloud workloads, and networks.
This strategy uses continuous sharing of information about the various threats, providing centralized visibility that also allows investigative analysis to make systems as resilient as possible.
Therefore, by comparing the data collected through MARS with the wealth of information already present in the Trend Micro Smart Protection Network globally, they are able to identify and block those mobile applications that are potentially malicious or consume too many resources, such as battery, bandwidth, etc.
In particular, they monitor attempts to steal sensitive data, online banking, adware, and other threats.
Head of Marketing at Trend Micro Italy, Lisa Dolcini, said:
“The threat landscape is constantly evolving, but Android attacks have become an established phenomenon in recent years. It is important that users always adopt a secure approach when using their devices, protecting them with secure passwords or adopting password management software, installing security apps to check if their devices are infected, and above all keeping an eye out for promotions or links that could lead to fraud or theft of personal data, as well as installing applications only from official stores”.
