{"id":165002,"date":"2023-02-27T06:00:42","date_gmt":"2023-02-27T14:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mcafee.com\/blogs\/?p=165002"},"modified":"2024-06-05T11:50:02","modified_gmt":"2024-06-05T18:50:02","slug":"mcafee-2023-consumer-mobile-threat-report","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mcafee.com\/blogs\/internet-security\/mcafee-2023-consumer-mobile-threat-report\/","title":{"rendered":"McAfee 2023 Consumer Mobile Threat Report"},"content":{"rendered":"

Smartphones put the proverbial world in the palm of your hand\u2014you pay with it, play with it, keep in touch with it, and even run parts of your home with it. No wonder hackers and scammers have made smartphones a target. A prime one.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Each year, our <\/span>Consumer Mobile Threat Report<\/span><\/a> uncovers trends in mobile threats, which detail tricks that hackers and scammers have turned to, along with ways you can protect yourself from them. For 2023, the big trend is apps. Malicious apps, more specifically.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Malicious and fake apps<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/h2>\n

Malicious apps often masquerade as games, office utilities, and communication tools. Yet now with the advent of a <\/span>ChatGPT AI chatbot<\/span><\/a> and <\/span>the DALL-E 2 AI image generator, <\/span>yet more AI-related malicious apps have cropped up to cash in on the buzz.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And money is what it\u2019s all about. Hackers and scammers generally want your money, or they want your data and personal info that they can turn into money. Creating fraudulent ads, stealing user credentials, or skimming personal information are some of the most common swindles that these apps try. Much of this can happen in the background, often without victims knowing it.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

How do these apps end up on people\u2019s phones? Sometimes they\u2019re downloaded from third-party app stores, which may not have a rigorous review process in place to spot malicious apps\u2014or the third-party store may be a front for distributing malware-laden apps.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

They also find their way into legitimate app stores, like Apple\u2019s App Store and Google Play. While these stores indeed have review processes in place to weed out malicious apps, hackers and scammers have found workarounds. Sometimes they upload an app that\u2019s initially clean and then push the malware to users as part of an update. Other times, they embed the malicious code so that it only triggers once it\u2019s run in certain countries. They will also encrypt bad code in the app that they submit, which can make it difficult for stores to sniff out.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In all, our report cites several primary ways how hackers and scammers are turning to apps today:<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n