Researchers trying to determine extent of malware infection rates on smartphones

Researchers in Finland are trying to measure the severity at which smartphones could be infected by malware infections.

University of Helsinki researchers working at the Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Secure Computing (ICRI-SC) will present a paper at this year's World Wide Web conference which will provide an answer to this question based on their work in the 'Malware Insights' project.

The project team has been investigating the true extent of malware infection in Android devices and has discovered that infection rates in Android devices at around 0.25 per cent are significantly higher than the previous independent estimate after collecting anonymous data from over 50,000 devices during a seven-month period.

The researchers, after speculating that smartphones infected with malicious apps might have other apps in common, investigated the possibility to develop a technique to identify devices infected with previously unknown malware and in their dataset, this approach is up to five times more likely to identify infected devices than by choosing devices at random.

The Malware Insights project is part of the research being done at the Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Secure Computing.