Romania, 8th in the world by share of users attacked by mobile ransomware

Romania is ranked eighth in the top of countries with the largest number of users attacked by mobile ransomware, according to Kaspersky Lab's report on the evolution of mobile malware in 2018.

Kaspersky Lab researchers have found that the number of attacks using mobile malware has almost doubled in just one year. In 2018 there were 116.5 million attacks, compared with 66.4 million in 2017, with a significant increase in the number of unique users affected by such threats.

The number of attacked users increased by 774,000 year-on-year in 2018, to a total of almost 9.9 million. Trojan-dropper threats were the ones that registered the most significant increase, their share almost doubling from 8.63% to 17.21%. This malware is designed to bypass system protection and deliver various other types of malware, from banking Trojans to ransomware.

The top of countries with the highest percentage of users attacked by mobile ransomware is led by the US (where 1.42% of users encountered it). Romania is ranked eighth with a share of 0.27%.

In 2018, Kaspersky Lab products protected 80,638 users from 150 countries against mobile device ransomware, with 60,176 new mobile ransomware Trojans detected. Moreover, last year were detected 151,359 installation packages for mobile Trojans, a figure 1.6 times higher than the year before.

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