Why Antimalware Software will continue to remain a challenge going forward

The Mobile anti-malware software provides protection to mobile devices against unwanted spyware that access information without the users’ knowledge. Malware attacks are one of the most significant challenges for cyber security. These threats ascertain and exploit vulnerabilities and then use these identified vulnerabilities for further incursion into a mobile network.

Mobile Threat Defence (MTD) is the popular term for anti-virus for mobile devices(Know how secure is your mobile app). Anti-virus is basically pointless as it works in an app-centric manner, i.e. anti-virus will not scan all the apps installed in a device. It will work only for a particular application. However, that does not mean that it is useless or unnecessary. However, when we are talking about Mobile Thread Defence, we need to understand that app-centric anti-viruses are not very helpful. The reason for this is, malware can virtually take any action when running with high privileges. In the case of mobility, we need to worry about information or identity theft. This kind of behavior can be embedded in inconspicuous looking apps such as games, installed from third-party app stores. Since a smartphone is a personal device and moves around with the user, it becomes an ideal target to snoop private data, such as contacts, SMS messages and so on. It also becomes easy for these absolutely innocent-looking apps to siphon information from the phone and pass it on hackers.

With the technological evolution and increasing competition among smartphone users, additional consumer-centric features are expected to be incorporated in the near future, which is expected to lay the necessity of additional layers of security, including data encryption. This is expected to drive the market during the forecast period. Ever-changing technology and platforms of mobile devices are the biggest challenges for a mobile anti-malware market. For example, we first had native apps, we then had hybrid apps, we now have cross-platform apps. We will also have apps residing in a cloud making security breaches more real than we can imagine.

As the first step, every mobile device needs to be installed with the Antimalware software. In the recent past, Android, for example, has been targeted for malware. The organization must have a policy whereby anyone using their device for accessing official sites and information, must have an antimalware software installed on the device. Not installing antimalware would mean that malware after an invasion has to be detected. This is extremely difficult. If before installation, the user notices unresponsive graphical interface or a faster battery exhaustion, the user has room to be suspicious that a malware has invaded his smartphone.

The best method to ward off viruses is to keep the phones software up-to-date. Android and iOS are regularly updated for security purposes and users need to update their software whenever they are prompted to do so. This will help to some extent to ward off viruses. Mobile anti-malware delivers full life-cycle security against zero-day and phishing with a complete in-depth security framework.
This can work in the short term but for the long term, we need to come up with better solutions.