19.2 million Android applications with malware have been detected so far by the company specialized in computer security and called TrendMicro. It announced the figure yesterday and we are talking about a huge number of unique malware applications that were detected by its software in Android smartphones used globally.
If in 2015 10 million applications with malware were detected by TrendMicro, it seems that this number has doubled in the course of a single year. This suggests that hackers are capable of extracting money from Android users, otherwise they wouldn't bother to develop so many malware apps to distribute around the world.
Most types of malware developed for the Android platform are designed to attack corporate users, with China being the country with the most attacks. Attacking these users is perfectly normal, the hackers being able to steal from them not only money, but also various information regarding the companies where they work.
In 2016, TrendMicro blocked 65 million attacks against Android users, which is still small compared to the more than 1 billion users of the platform. Of course, few people install an antivirus application on their phone, and those with Android who do not, become the targets of hackers who launch malware applications that affect their terminals.
"65 million: the number of times we've blocked mobile threats in 2016. By December 2016, the total number of unique samples of malicious Android apps we've collected and analyzed hit the 19.2 million mark—a huge leap from the 10.7 million samples collected in 2015."
