Just talked over the phone to John Harrison, Symantec Product Manager for Endpoint Thread Protection, Security Technology and Response, on a white paper Symantec is releasing today about mobile security.

Basically it provides an analysis of the current monetization schemes behind the growing wave of malware targeting the Android mobile computing platform and schemes likely to be seen in the future.

The paper’s key finding is that the majority of current efforts to monetize mobile malware have only a low revenue-per-infection ratio, thus limiting the return on investment achieved by attackers. 

Talking to John Harrison, Symantec Product Manager for Endpoint Thread Protection, Security Technology and Response we found out this ratio is likely to increase in the future as smartphones gain traction as payment devices. Smartphone usage is growing exponentially.

The whitepaper offers insight into the top current mobile malware monetization schemes observed by Symantec, including how each scheme works and examples of the malware presently being used to carry them out. These schemes are:

• Premium rate number billing scams
• Spyware
• Search engine poisoning
• Pay-per-click scams
• Pay-per-install schemes
• Adware 

Motivations of Recent Android Malware PDF download...