This week at the Black Hat Security Conference, Lookout will launch the App Genome Project, the largest mobile application dataset ever created. Currently around 300,000 applications over two platforms.
The App Genome Project will allow the study of mobile applications to identify security threats in the wild and provide insight into how applications are accessing personal data, as well as other phone resources.
You can see a larger view of the above image here.
Early findings show the differences in the sensitive data accessed by Android and iPhones:
– 29% of free applications on Android have the capability to access a user’s location, compared with 33% of free applications on iPhone.
– Nearly twice as many free applications have the capability to access user’s contact data on iPhone (14%) as compared to Android (8%)
– 47% of free Android apps include third party code, while that number is 23% on iPhone*
One app for example is definitely worth investigating. Jackeey Wallpaper on Android application aggregates your browsing history, voice mail password, text messages, and even your SIM ID and beams it all to a server in China. Why? This app alone has been download millions of times.
Via Engadget
