Mobile Malware is constantly increasing and scammers are targeting the advertising industry to redirect users to ad pages, a type of advertising hijacking.
Mobile Malware is on the rise, and scammers are targeting the advertising industry with malicious code that can redirect users to ad pages, a tactic known as Advertising hijacking. These “rogue mobile apps” consume petabytes of data per day, and some researchers estimate that the phenomenon costs about a trillion dollars per year.
It is estimated that approximately 5000 malicious mobile applications (IOS + Android) display ads, under the status of illegality and are re-downloaded, without the user's knowledge, even if the users are not using the mobile application, resulting in revenue generation for the fraudsters. This system is effective mainly because it imitates human interaction.
Mike Andrews, Antoni Kolev, David Sendroff, and Matt Vella, researchers from Forensiq in New York, explained that while “rogue mobile apps” produce 20 ads per minute (700 per hour), a legitimate ad-serving app produces one ad per minute.
So many ads generate a lot of traffic per day on mobile devices, and they affect about 15% of apps across the market.
“The fraudulent apps were observed to sell traffic through the largest and most prominent networks. These apps will create an average of 1,100 connections per minute and 320 communications with ad networks, ad servers, exchanges, and data providers over the course of an hour,” the report published by the researchers states.
The financial impact on advertisers is huge, instead of advertising the product, aggressive applications "hijack" mobile devices, causing costs to businesses. Experts estimate that advertisers on iOS will lose $363 million, on Android the loss is estimated at $480 million, and on Windows Mobile about $14 million.
Research revealed that antivirus solutions are incapable of detecting this ad hijacking technique.
Based on the results of the research, they concluded that 13.3% of mobile apps in inventory and 14.6% of mobile apps in exhibiting have high levels of risk.
