Cybercriminals know the value of a popular smartphone app, and this year they cloned 97% of the most popular Android apps and 87% of iOS apps.
Although the numbers seem large, in the case of Android, the number of cloned apps has actually decreased compared to the previous 2 years. For iOS, things are not so good, however, since the percentage of cloned apps for Apple's software rose to 31%, thus showing the preference of scammers for this particular software.
Categories on Android and iOS
The research was conducted by Arxan Technology, which counted the 100 most popular paid apps based on downloads for both software. With that as a guide, they searched for these apps in third-party app stores, outside of the official ones, as well as various websites that claim to have such apps, as well as torrents.
The report compiled by Arxan also included free apps for Android and iOS, which are in the top 20. For Android, the apps that were cloned were 80%, while for Apple, it was 75%. The categories they chose for the research were: finance, health and commerce. The top 40 in each category brought Android apps first with 95% finance, 90% health and 90% commerce.
On iOS, commercial apps were cloned at 35%, while financial apps rose to 70%, up from 36% last year. These are the most popular categories that scammers are targeting to steal sensitive data from unsuspecting users. The percentage of all apps is expected to increase by the end of 2014.
In these cases, security is not the sole responsibility of developers and companies, since users must also be careful about the applications they download and install on their smartphones, as well as on which pages they enter their personal information.
What companies need to do is make the applications they release more secure for users, so that it is not so easy for someone to copy and clone them with the aim of defrauding users.
