Nigeria has been named as one of the top 10 countries globally where Internet users were attacked by mobile malware in 2020, according to a new report by Kaspersky.
The Mobile Malware Evolution 2020 report added that Nigeria climbed two places to the number five spot in the list, recording 22 per cent attacks of the total share.
Three other African countries made it to the list: Algeria ranked second in the list (31.29 per cent) and Morocco in fourth place (22.67 per cent) and Kenya in the eight place(18.52 per cent).
The list was topped by Iran (67.78 per cent) with the highest number of attacks on users. Bangladesh is in the third place.
Analysts at Kaspersky said that attackers constantly monitor the situation in the world, collecting the most interesting topics for potential victims, and then use these for infection or cheating users out of their money.
As such, the cybersecurity company said atteckers leverage the COVID-19 pandemic to introduce new topics with the word “covid” in various combinations in the names of packages hiding spyware and banking Trojans, adware or Trojan droppers.
It said number of users attacked steadily decreased over the past year.
The company noted that the number of users encountering mobile threats in 2020 was on the average a quarter lower than that in 2019.
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Kaspersky said an average monthly number of attacks on mobile users decreased by 865,000 compared to 2019.
The company discovered 5,683,694 mobile malicious installation packages in 2020, which was 2,100,000 more than in 2019.
It added that the the share of adware attacks increased in relation to mobile malware in general.
Though adware attack was 12.85 per cent in 2019, it reached 14.62 per cent in 2020.
