2017 marked not only an explosion in mobile malware but also showed dramatic changes in the mobile landscape, setting up this year to be one of the riskiest years yet. In 2018, there will be an estimated five billion mobile subscribers worldwide which could be enticing bait for malware authors, who have ramped up the number of attacks and their sophistication.
With so many offerings in the mobile security space, independent testing such as AV-Test and AV Comparatives serve a critical role in separating marketing hype from reality. Not only do consumers benefit, but ultimately so do the respective vendors participating in the testing.
McAfee Labs detected more than 16 million mobile malware infestations in the third quarter of 2017 alone, nearly doubling the number we saw a year earlier. The latest round of testing from AV-Test in January 2018, provides some key insights into where the current threat landscape stands not to mention trends about where the threat landscape is heading.
AV-Test evaluates each vendor out of a possible 13 points. Six points for protection, six for usability/performance and one point for bonus features.
Twenty-one Android antivirus solutions were put to the test against 6,000 Android malware samples. Threats targeting consumers in every major category are proportionally selected to represent the wild, a term used by the cybersecurity industry to represent real-world conditions. 3,000 non-malicious programs were also tested to ensure that the antivirus product didn’t wrongly identify them as malware – a term known as False Positives.
McAfee Mobile Security 4.9 achieved a perfect score of 13 out of 13 again and remains one of the best-in-class mobile security products available today.
Data published in the latest security report from Google, shows that the risk to the Android ecosystem is very real. 39 million threats were removed last year from Google Play. Depending on the built in security measure is no longer enough, consumers need to have an additional security product.
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