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Android / Security
A Short History of Mobile Malware
Revealing the most dangerous Android vulnerability
Series outline:
- Part 1: A Short History of Mobile Malware (you are here)
- Part 2: The Layers of the Android Security Model
- Part 3: Mitigating Android Social Engineering Attacks
The context generated by the COVID-19 pandemic determined attackers to retarget their arsenal towards a more susceptible audience.
To an extent, the human immune system is able to adapt and defend people against the threat of biological viruses.
Yet, what is there to defend them against computer viruses?
To identify the recurrent vulnerability that is being exploited by attackers, we will take a short journey through the history of mobile malware.
The Mobile Malware Timeline
The virus writers haven’t yet penetrated the mobile malware sector until 2004, when the first mobile virus (targeting and running on a mobile device), was found in the wild. The source code of this virus acted as a base for the surge of subsequent mobile malware.
1. Cabir¹ (2004)
Mobile security became a concern in June 2004, when a professional virus and worm coder group known as 29A created a virus named Cabir (also known as Caribe, Syb- mOS/Cabir, Symbian/Cabir and EPOC.cabir). It was named by Kaspersky employees after their colleague Elena Kabirova.
At Kaspersky, Roman Kuzmenko was responsible for the analysis of the virus. It didn’t took him long to find out that the virus was designed for Symbian OS running on an ARM processor.
This combination of OS and processor existed only in Nokia phones. Consequently, it was assumed that the virus is targeting mobile phones — the first virus for mobile phones.
Getting a hold of a yet to be established area of security was a hard task but it…
