Looking only at the data provided by security firms, the world appears on the verge of a mobile malware apocalypse.
The number of samples—which represent unique, but mostly automatically generated variants of malicious programs—exceeded 5 million in the third quarter of 2014, according to security firm McAfee. Using a different counting method, security firm Symantec classified a similar magnitude—1 million of the 6.3 million mobile apps it discovered—as malware in 2014.
Yet, these data points tell only the darker side of the story. An increasing volume of data supports the idea that Apple’s and Google’s gated communities for mobile software have paid security dividends and kept most monstrous malware at bay.
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