Android Users in India Almost Twice as Likely to be Affected by Malware: Google

How Nokia, Microsoft, Apple and Others Reacted to Android 10 Years Ago

In its latest report virtually the state of Android security, Google has claimed that its continuing efforts to fortify its mobile OS means that the platform is now as secured as any other platform. The report, titled 'Android Security: 2017 Year in Review', lays out a number of initiatives that the company has implemented recently in trying to cut downwardly on instances of malware attacks.

One of those cardinal initiatives is Google Play Protect, something the visitor added concluding year to notice and cease Play Store apps that may pose a security hazard to users. According to Google, Play Protect reviewed about 23 million new apps last year, and automatically disabled PHAs or potentially harmful apps, from roughly one meg devices. The company also says that offline scanning blocked over 10 million harmful app installs concluding year alone. The visitor also says that information technology updated its cloud-based security and heuristic analysis capabilities in 2017.

"Our machine learning models successfully detected 60.iii% of PHAs identified past Google Play Protect in 2017"

Co-ordinate to Google, the three countries with the largest number of Android devices with Google Play Protect are India, the U.s.a. (U.s.) and Brazil. Sadly, though, users in India remain near twice every bit likely to be affected by PHAs compared to other countries, seeing every bit ane percent of devices in the country are affected past the upshot, as opposed to the global average of 0.56 percent. The United states and Brazil, meanwhile, are better off than the rest of the earth, with PHA infestations of 0.four percent and 0.26 pct.

Timely security updates likewise get a long way in keeping whatsoever operating platform secure, and towards that end, Google announced Project Treble that will allow Android OEMs to button through updates quickly without having to wait for suppliers to release their binary codes. The visitor also emphasized its re-architected Android Verified Boot 2.0 that works with Project Treble and, "provides a hardware-based root of trust, and confirms the state of each stage of the boot process for devices with at to the lowest degree 1GB of RAM".

"Devices with Treble are easier to update, which should mean faster security patches and Android version updates for the whole ecosystem"

The company besides outlines other useful services, such equally the Android Device Director service, which was renamed to 'Find My Device' last twelvemonth, and picked up a few more features that would help owners track their lost devices easier. The visitor likewise points out that, In 2017, information technology added new APIs to 'SafetyNet' to allow developers to raise the security bar for their apps. One of those is that reCAPTCHA API, "which uses an avant-garde risk assay engine to protect apps from spam and other abusive deportment".

Other new security-focused features include more granular controls over app permissions, enhanced privacy controls, kernel hardening, Keystore updates, Secure Lockscreen, tamper-resistant hardware fries, the introduction of sanitizers and fuzzing, and many more primal steps that Google says has helped Android go every bit secure as any operating platform right now.

Concluding, but not the least, the company also says that the Android Security Inquiry program paid out $1.28 million last yr for discovering and reporting vulnerabilities in Android, bringing the total to $two.ii million since its inception in 2015. The visitor also pointed out that "no exploits successfully compromised Google Pixel devices" at the 2017 Mobile Pwn2Own contest".