A MONTHLY MOBILE REVIEW

The Growing Problem of Mobile Adware

SEPTEMBER 2012

This monthly report reviews the mobile landscape including the findings of Trend Micro engineers and researchers. In this report we look at the impact of mobile adware, and need for increased battery life

MONTHLY MOBILE REVIEW: THE GROWING PROBLEM OF MOBILE ADWARE

Battery anxiety: the trouBle With SmartphoneS today

The last quarter of the year always sees lots of new and improved smartphones hitting the market. Most offer brighter and higher resolution displays, faster processors, more advanced cameras, and sleeker designs. However, consumers tell us they are more concerned about the battery life of their device than the clarity of their display or the crispness of their photos. A Trend Micro study found that battery usage/drain is the biggest smartphone concern for more than 60% of respondents.

Smartphone manufacturers appear to be receiving the same feedback, with battery life being a major focus for releases this season. However while they introduce smaller and more powerful batteries, along with new advancements in charging technology, other trends in mobile devices will undoubtedly offset these battery enhancements.

The latest power-hungry trends and technologies include 4G/LTE which delivers lightning-fast Internet access and data download but potentially consumes more power. Multi-core processors make devices faster but require more power. Users also prefer slimmer, sleeker phones that require smaller batteries that are often built into the device. For low-end devices this potentially means less capacity along with the inconvenience of not being able to use a spare battery.

Smartphone owners are then left to manually manage the power consumption of their devices. This may lead to constantly monitoring and tweaking settings like mobile data and Wi-Fi access, screen timeout, screen brightness, Bluetooth activity, and killing

background processes. This is beyond most users’ technical skill set, leaving them to suffer through poor battery life on their smartphones.

A recent study by the Purdue University and Microsoft highlighted another power-hungry activity that is present in almost all smartphones today. The study showed the impact of advertisements being displayed on mobile devices through the use of apps. The study highlighted that “65-75 percent of energy in free apps is spent in third-party advertisement modules.”

Our recent analysis of Android smartphones has shown that approximately 12 percent completely run out of power each day. This can be extremely inconvenient and even dangerous as users become disconnected from friends and families. Our threat research during August has also highlighted a concerning increase in the prevalence of adware in Android apps. While these apps can house malicious routines and links to malicious websites, they also pose a risk to battery life as shown by the Purdue study.

A Trend Micro study on smartphone battery life

MONTHLY MOBILE REVIEW: THE GROWING PROBLEM OF MOBILE ADWARE

threat Spotlight: the riSe of moBile adWare

A significant part of the mobile malware we encountered in August was from the AIRPUSH and ADWLEADBOLT families. These are our detections for mobile apps that use the AirPush and Leadbolt advertising networks, respectively.

Advertising networks offer mobile app developers a variety of ways to display ads. Most of these are perfectly legitimate, since they are contained within the app. However, an increasing number of mobile ad networks like AirPush and Leadbolt also place ads outside of the app. In particular, they send ads to users in the form of notifications, as well as adding unrelated icons to the user’s phone. Viewing the notification can launch the phone’s browser to display the advertiser’s website. These ad networks also tend to collect personal information, in many instances, without explicit user knowledge or intervention.

This behavior is comparable to adware on desktop computers, which we detect and remove from user systems. Mobile adware can make mobile devices run slower, consume data and drain battery, not to mention causing potential annoyance and inconvenience. In addition, malicious apps have also been used to abuse the notification bar. Thus, users may find it difficult to differentiate between “legitimate” ads and malware.

Figure 1. Top malware families in August 2012

MONTHLY MOBILE REVIEW: THE GROWING PROBLEM OF MOBILE ADWARE

moBile top 10 in auguSt 2012

The following are the countries with the highest risk for malicious application download:

1. Argentina

2. Kuwait

3. Russia

4. India

5. Brazil

6. Thailand

7. Philippines

8. Malaysia

9. Saudi Arabia

10. Indonesia

* Ratings are provided by analyzing real-time threat detection in Trend Micro™ Mobile Security Personal

Edition. Due to technical reasons, China is not included.

The following are countries with the highest download rate of apps that consume the most power:

1. Switzerland

2. Israel

3. Taiwan

4. Saudi Arabia

5. Sweden

6. Malaysia

7. Singapore

8. Italy

9. Ireland

10. Portugal

* Ratings are provided by analyzing real-time app scanning results in Trend Micro™ Longevity for Android. Due

to technical reasons China and Japan are not included.

TREND MICRO™Trend Micro Incorporated (TYO: 4704; TSE: 4704), a global cloud secu-rity leader, creates a world safe for exchanging digital information with its Internet content security and threat management solutions for busi-nesses and consumers. A pioneer in server security with over 20 years’ experience, we deliver top-ranked client, server and cloud-based security that fits our customers’ and partners’ needs, stops new threats faster, and protects data in physical, virtualized and cloud environments. Powered by the industry-leading Trend Micro™ Smart Protection Network™ cloud computing security infrastructure, our products and services stop threats where they emerge—from the Inter-net. They are supported by 1,000+ threat intelligence experts around the globe.

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