The Company You Keep: Mobile Malware Infection Rates and Inexpensive Risk Indicators
Hien Thi Thu Truong, Eemil Lagerspetz, Petteri Nurmi, Adam J. Oliner,, Sasu Tarkoma, N. Asokan, Sourav Bhattacharya

TL;DR
This study provides the first independent measurement of Android malware infection rates using data from over 55,000 devices, revealing higher infection rates than previous estimates and evaluating inexpensive indicators for identifying infected devices.
Contribution
It offers the first direct measurement of Android malware infection rates and assesses inexpensive device indicators as proxies for infection risk.
Findings
Infection rates are around 0.26-0.28%, higher than prior estimates.
Application set indicators improve infection detection by approximately 4.7 times.
Infected devices show marginally higher battery usage.
Abstract
There is little information from independent sources in the public domain about mobile malware infection rates. The only previous independent estimate (0.0009%) [12], was based on indirect measurements obtained from domain name resolution traces. In this paper, we present the first independent study of malware infection rates and associated risk factors using data collected directly from over 55,000 Android devices. We find that the malware infection rates in Android devices estimated using two malware datasets (0.28% and 0.26%), though small, are significantly higher than the previous independent estimate. Using our datasets, we investigate how indicators extracted inexpensively from the devices correlate with malware infection. Based on the hypothesis that some application stores have a greater density of malicious applications and that advertising within applications and…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAdvanced Malware Detection Techniques · Network Security and Intrusion Detection · Spam and Phishing Detection
