Mobile malware threat was overstated, Intel Security admits
Attacks on mobile devices have not been as prevalent as predicted at time of McAfee acquisition, Intel Security concedes
Intel Security has admitted the threat posed by mobile malware has grown "much more slowly" than it anticipated.
The vendor made the admission in its latest McAfee Labs Threat Report, which saw it reflect on how the threat landscape has evolved since it acquired McAfee for $7.68bn (£5bn) five years ago.
Mobile devices have seen a rapid growth in malware attacks but most remain at an "exploratory stage" or are "relatively minor in impact", it said, conceding that this state of affairs did not chime with its original expectations.
"Although the volume of mobile devices has increased even faster than we expected, serious broad-based attacks on those devices has grown much more slowly than we thought," Intel Security stated in the report.
The report indicated that the mobile malware infection rate fell to about six per cent in Q2, down from about 20 per cent in the same quarter last year. The total number of mobile malware samples grew 17 per cent quarter on quarter to more than eight million in Q2, McAfee Labs found.
"The value of data recoverable from a smartphone is relatively low, and smartphones are not a prominent attack vector for the enterprise," Intel Security said as it sought to explain why mobile malware is not higher up on the cybercriminal pecking order.
"The automatic backup capability of many smartphones and tablets make them straightforward to clean and recover if they are infected or ransomed, at least until criminals manage to attack the cloud-based backups. Application markets for smartphones and tablets are also much more restrictive, acting like whitelisting services to limit downloads of malicious apps. These restrictions are not 100 per cent effective, but they do constrain the growth of mobile attacks."
One category of malware that is booming right now is ransomware, the report found, with the total number of ransomware samples mushrooming by 127 per cent year on year to more than four million in Q2. Intel Security attributed this to fast-growing new families such as CTB-Locker and CryptoWall.
The firm did go on to say, however, that most of its predictions had come true, but it added that the pace of change since 2010 had generally exceeded, rather than trailed, its expectations.
"Today, we face nation-state cyberwarfare that includes some highly visible, although actively denied, state-sponsored attacks as well as long-term espionage," it said. "Again, although we expected and predicted most of this development, the rapid evolution of malware, increase in attack volume, and large scale of nation-state attacks has been surprising."