In recent years smartphone sales tr

In recent years smartphone sales tremendously increased.
This explosive growth has drawn the attention of criminals
who try to attract the user to install malicious software
on the device. Google’s smartphone platform Android is
the most popular operating system and recently overtook
Symbian- and iOS-based installations. Most probably, this
growth stems from the openness of the platform which allows
a user to install arbitrary software.
But attackers are misusing this openness to spread malicious
applications through common Android application markets. In previous work [22] we analyzed about 6,100
malicious applications and clustered them into 53 malware
families with the help of the VirusTotal API [15]. Nearly
57% of our analyzed malware families tried to steal personal
information from the smartphone like address book
entries, the IMEI or GPS coordinates. Additionally, sending
SMS messages rates with about 45%. Most common
was sending these messages to premium rated numbers to
make money immediately. The last main feature which was
implemented in nearly 20% of the malware families is the
ability to connect to a remote server in order to receive
and execute commands. Another detailed and well-readable
overview of all these existent malware families is provided
by Zhou et al. [27].