NEW DELHI: Growing popularity of smartphones and rising data usage in India is also making the country a favourite among cybercriminals, who are increasingly attacking mobile phones using malware.

India, the world's fastest growing handset market, is the fourth most affected globally by mobile malwares, a report by security solutions provider F-Secure said.

According to F-Secure Lab's Threat Report H1 2014, India follows the UK, France and Saudi Arabia in reporting of mobile malware incidents.

In April-June 2014, 295 new threat families and variants were discovered — 294 on Android and one on iOS. That's up from 277 threats discovered in January-March 2014, of which 275 targeted Android, the report said.

Top Android threats in Q2 were Trojans that either send SMS messages to premium numbers or harvest data from a device and forward it on to a remote server. Slocker malware reported in June, which pretends to be a legitimate app, was the first ransomware to appear on the mobile platform, it added.

Commenting on the India findings, F-Secure security advisor (ASIA) Goh Su Gim said, "India is seeing a rise in premium content SMS type malware."

Besides, mobile ransomeware is going to be the next wave of attack for handsets and it is being increasingly seen that these ransomeware is also targeting enterprises. Earlier they were confined to individual users, he added.

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