MOSCOW—A new report indicates that mobile malware attacks are rapidly rising.
According to Kaspersky Lab, the amount of new malicious programs affecting mobile devices rose 10.8% in the third quarter of 2015.
Overall, 323,374 malware programs were detected in Q3, a three-fold rise over the amount seen in the first quarter of the year, the study shows.
The report found that there were more than 1.5 million malicious packages installed on mobile devices during the quarter, 1.5 times more than in the previous quarter, reported Tech Week Europe.
The most common mobile threat came from mobile advertising, with Trojan attacks that root a device and use superuser privileges accounting for more than half the most popular mobile malware.
Kaspersky said it blocked almost 626,000 attempts to launch malware capable of stealing money via access to users’ online banking during the third quarter. The figure is actually 17.2% lower than in the second quarter of the year, yet it is a 5.7% increase since Q3 2014.
In total, there were 5.68 million notifications from Kaspersky products about attempted malware infections to steal money from users via online access to bank accounts during the quarter.
“The developments in Q3 demonstrate that the global threat landscape is continuing to evolve at a fast pace,” David Emm, principal security researcher at Kaspersky Lab, told Tech Week Europe.