Report: Researchers Find an Average of ~8,400 Pieces of Android Malware Every Day

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Being the most dominant platform in any market means there are going to be a lot of malicious actors targeting Android with malware. We’ve seen this happen with Windows over the years, and now more people are targeting Android than ever before due to how many people are using it. Some reports peg Android’s global market share at 72%, while others go even higher. Google has gotten very serious about keeping Android secure over the years and their monthly security updates are going a long way to help this.

Still, not every smartphone and tablet receives these monthly security updates. Some devices go months without receiving patches for the latest exploits and others aren’t even supported anymore. Thus many consumers are forced to either buy a new phone in order to keep it secure, or hope that community developers will maintain and support the device with custom ROMs. A new report from G DATA shows exactly how important these security updates are, and how more pieces of malware are found every single day.

The research company released a report at the end of last month that detailed their findings for the first quarter of 2017. Their security researchers say they discovered over 750,000 new Android malware applications during the first quarter of the year. When averaging this out, that equates to just under 8,400 instances of new Android malware every single day. This is a growing trend and it’s something that G DATA feels will continue to grow this year as well.

According to their data, 2013 saw almost 1.2 million pieces of Android malware being discovered by the company. This increased to close to 1.55 million in 2014 before it rose to 2.33 million in 2015, and finally last year they found just under 3.25 million instances of malware for Android. The company says they are forecasting this year to end with around 3.5 million instance of malware, but it could go even higher. So it just goes to show you how important it is for an OEM to push out monthly security updates to their customers.