Report: Over 1 billion Google Play downloads of finance apps targeted by malware

According to Zimperium’s latest report, mobile banking, investment, payment and cryptocurrency apps targeted by ten prolific families of Trojan malware have been downloaded from Google Play Store over 1,012,452,500 times worldwide.

Researchers identified Teabot as the trojan malware targeting most mobile financial applications (410), followed by ExobotCompact.D/Octo (324). The most targeted banking application is “BBVA Spain | Online Banking” which has been downloaded over 10 million times and is targeted by 6 out of 10 reported banking Trojans. The top three mobile financial apps targeted by trojans focus on mobile payments and alternative assets such as cryptocurrency and gold. These apps account for over 200,000,000 downloads worldwide.

The report revealed that the banking and financial services sectors are subject to increasingly sophisticated Trojan horse attacks that put financial institutions and their customers at risk. These attacks pose various risks to users, some of which capture keystrokes or steal credentials to use for nefarious activities, and others are able to steal money directly from victims. With the increasing number of consumers worldwide using mobile apps for all forms of banking and investment activity, the attack surface has grown for criminals with greater reward and less physical risk than stealing from a bank location.

No region is immune to these attacks. As banking Trojans continue to undergo development updates with new features and capabilities, both users and financial institutions are at increasing risk of this global economic threat. The US is the hardest-hit region with 121 financial applications targeted by banking Trojans, equivalent to more than 286,753,500 downloads. The UK and Italy are next with 55 and 43 target apps, respectively.

Zimperium’s research team analyzes hundreds of thousands of applications every day using state-of-the-art machine learning models and other proprietary techniques. The report tracks 639 financial applications, including mobile banking, investing, payments, and cryptocurrency apps. All financial application goals in the report are available through the Google Play Store.

Read Zimperium’s full report.