Mobile Banking Heists: The Global Economic Threat Report

Mobile Banking Heists – The Global Economic Threat Report

Zimperium’s research team analyses several hundred thousand applications each day with state-of-the-art machine learning models and other proprietary techniques. The mobile banking samples covered in this report were collected and classified using this methodology.

Zimperium, Inc. a global leader in mobile device and app security, has published a report on the increasing risk to financial institutions and their consumers face due to trojan horse malware targeting mobile applications. The report examines 10 prolific banking trojans targeting Android mobile apps of users worldwide, detailing their features and capabilities. The financial application targets covered in the report are available through the Google Play Store. The report provides detailed information on what makes each malware family different, highlighting the unique and advanced malicious features that make each banking trojan family unique. A complete list of all 639 financial applications covering banking, investment, payment, and cryptocurrency services and the different banking trojan families targeting each is provided.

The rapid expansion of finance apps, and their value as a lucrative target, means that threats have grown more frequent, more complex, and more difficult to prevent using basic security measures. As demonstrated through the capabilities of some of the banking trojans highlighted in this report, malicious actors are casting a wide net to collect critical login and (multi-factor) authentication information, and account holder and credit card data, with the objective of financial fraud. The criminal organisations and malicious actors behind the banking malware thrive on the inadequate security, if any present, of the mobile banking apps.

Some of the global threat highlights include;
Australia: 26 of the 53 Australian banks manage 34 mobile banking apps with over 12,752,000 downloads from the Google Play Store. Fourteen of these banking apps are targeted by three or more banking trojans.
New Zealand: While banking trojans target only 1 in 5 New Zealand bank apps, these apps account for 2,605,000 downloads, more than half the nation’s population.

This Zimperium report takes you through key observations, global threat highlights. mobile banking trojan capabilities, consumer victims, the risks of inadequate mobile financial application security, command and control locations, and the banking trojan families.

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