Nokia report: phones see 96% increase in malware

Finnish company Nokia may no longer be a staple in the smartphone manufacturing space, but that doesn’t mean it’s totally out of the loop regarding software. The company’s latest edition of its malware paper– officially dubbed the Nokia Threat Intelligence Report — uncovers some dark numbers in the world of malicious smartphone software.

How dark? Well, for one, smartphones are becoming increasingly targeted in malware attacks.

The report, which covers the first half of 2016, discovered a 96% increase in the average smartphone infection rate, up from 0.25% to 0.49%. This number peaked in April, when one out of every 120 smartphones were infected with a breed of malware.

Considering that an estimated 2.08-billion people use smartphones, that infection rate is rather remarkable.

Nokia: One in every 120 smartphones were infected by a malicious app in H1 2016

Also, Nokia’s own malware samples database saw around 4.8-million new malicious apps recorded between December 2015 and July 2016. That’s a 75% increase.

And in terms of operating systems, Android’s the most commonly targeted. As the most commonly used operating system, around every three of four mobile devices (74%) infected with malware runs a version of Google’s OS. Surprisingly, Windows claimed 22%, while iOS and other platforms accounted for 4%.

According to Gartner, world smartphone sales ballooned by 3.9% in Q1 2016, with around 349-million devices sold in this period.

If Nokia’s numbers are anything to go by, the likelihood of your smartphone contracting a malicious nasty is on the increase.