It is just over 10 years since the first commercial smartphone using Google’s Android operating system was launched, and it has grown fast. Android is now the market-leading mobile OS, with a massive 88% market share and installed on an estimated 2 billion-plus devices globally. But success has its drawbacks: it’s also a target for criminal activity.
Google recently published its annual Android security report which sheds light on attempts to exploit the Android mobile ecosystem. The report states that 0.04% of all downloads from Google Play were classified as potentially harmful applications which is double the number detected in 2017.
That 0.04% may not sound like much, but the total number of Android app downloads in 2018 has been estimated at over 75 billion. So that equates to an estimated 30 million potentially harmful apps in the Play store, which contain malicious components such as mobile botnets, crypto-miners, adware and data-harvesting tools.
Defenx PLC (LON:DFX), founded in 2009 and listed on the London Stock Exchange, is an up-and-coming company in the mobile security sector which offers a wide range of solutions for the protection of smartphones, desktop PCs and laptops.