" ITREALMS: Nigeria’s financial sector faces Gamarue threats, mobile devices remain high priority - CheckPoint

Friday, July 01, 2016

Nigeria’s financial sector faces Gamarue threats, mobile devices remain high priority - CheckPoint

The top malware in Nigeria in the month of May has been revealed to be on financial sector, known as Gamarue, just as attacks on mobile devices remain high-priority, reports ITRealms.

The Check Point Software Technoogies latest report, the malware, Gamarue, is a modular bot that hides in trusted processes and could be used to harvest financial information.

According to the Area Manager for East and West Africa at Check Point Software Technologies, Mr. Rick Rogers, attacks against mobile devices also remained a high priority as Android malware HummingBad persisted in the overall top 10 of malware attacks across all platforms during the period.

“In both Kenya and Nigeria, Hummingbad ranks as the fifth most common malware form,” the checklist revealed, pointing out that this is happening despite only being discovered by Check Point researchers in February.

“It has rapidly become commonly used; indicating hackers view Android mobile devices as weak spots in enterprise security and as potentially high reward targets,” Rogers said.

He further believes that both of these threats are significant in the African context as Android phone sales and banking inclusion continue to move up the ladder.


“As Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) continues to be a trend and smartphone penetration on the continent grows, companies are at an increased risk from Hummingbad in particular, and other malware. Combined with the growth in malware family numbers overall, this represents a significant business risk. Enterprises of all sizes must educate themselves on the security threats they face and invest in solid measures to protect their networks and corporate data,” Rogers said.

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