Mobile threats are on the rise and more than 40 percent of devices are at risk

Mobile threat defense specialist Skycure has released its Mobile Threat Intelligence Report, which finds a frightening increase in threats to both enterprise and personal mobile devices.

Using analysis of worldwide mobile data from Skycure and outside sources, the report found 41 percent of mobile devices are at medium to high risk on the Skycure risk scale. Nearly two in every hundred are high risk devices that were already compromised or were under attack.

Skycure ranks devices according to a proprietary Mobile Threat Risk Score, which takes into account recent threats the device was exposed to, device vulnerabilities and configuration, and user behavior.

The report reviewed data from devices with Skycure either installed by enterprises on employees' mobile devices or by security-aware consumers. Despite having this protection, the report found that the majority (over 52 percent) of all devices do not even have a simple passcode enabled, and 30 percent of devices were running an out of date operating system.

Among the findings are that one in three Android devices is still vulnerable to one of the recent high-profile Android attacks, with an out-of-date operating system. Nearly three percent of Android devices are infected with malicious apps with medium to high severity and 27 percent of Android devices have third-party app installation enabled, meaning they can install apps outside the official Google Play store. Interestingly, 33 percent of enterprise-managed devices have this possible vulnerability enabled, compared to 20 percent of personal devices, because some enterprises use it to install third-party enterprise apps.

In addition more than 15 percent of Android devices have USB debugging enabled, an easy way for a malware application to make it to the mobile device from a computer. The report shows that iOS devices have their problems too with 26 percent having an out-of-date operating system.

Enterprise-managed devices do remove some of the risk though, the findings show that more than five times more personal Android devices are rooted than enterprise-managed devices. The report also found very few jailbroken iOS devices in enterprises.

"Witches and vampires might not be real", says Adi Sharabani, CEO of Skycure, just in case you hadn't noticed it's Halloween. "But threats to mobile devices are and based on what we’re seeing in this report people aren’t doing enough to protect themselves. Skycure brings invisible mobile threats to the surface, so that enterprises can fight the bad guys on a level playing field".

You can see more of the report's findings in the infographic below.

Photo Credit: lucadp/Shutterstock