Proofpoint Inc. Discovers That More Bible Apps Contain Malware Code Than Gambling Apps

Christmas is fast approaching, but there are those whose evil minds know no bounds and have hidden malware code in, guess where? Bible and related religious apps. In a season where Christ was the inspiration for the theme, it must be strategic that thousands of religiously themed apps have malware code injected into them.

According to a report from Forbes.com, around 280 unique Bible apps were discovered to contain malicious code, and around 140 have operated in a manner that has been classified as “high risk.” Forbes’ Thomas Fox-Brewster notes that “Apple is evidently doing a good job of keeping out dangerous Bibles,” as these 280 apps with malicious code, and 140 apps with “high risk” behavior were all found on the Android platform alone.

Proofpoint, Inc. managed to go through a total of 5,600 unique Bible apps, with the breakdown as follows:

-Android: 4,154

-iOS: 1,500

-208 apps with malicious code

-140 apps with “high risk behavior”

According to the report, 3.7 percent of the 5,654 Bible apps analyzed contained malware code. According to an InfoSecurity article by Phil Muncaster, this percentage is worrying for the apps’ category, as it denotes a higher percentage of the presence of malware code compared to other categories. By contrast, of 23,000 gambling apps analyzed, only 52 apps contained known malicious code, 379 were classified as “high risk” and only over 3,200 were considered as “moderate risk” apps for malware.

On a side note, our Muslim brethren can breathe easier, as only 1 percent of Quran apps were found to be infected, with the numbers broken down as follows:

-4,500 total number of apps analyzed

-Android: 3,804

-iOS: 646 for iOS

-16 apps found to be with malicious code

-38 with "high risk" behavior

At best, Muslim smartphone users can enjoy most of their Holy book apps without the worry that these would steal their data, or worse, cause their smartphones to go haywire.

As for the Jewish target market, only 1 percent of the apps contained malicious code, specifically 2 out of 200 total Torah apps analyzed. Apparently, our Jewish brethren can also breathe easy as well.

This disturbing report couldn’t come at a more incongruous time in the year, but as to be expected, malware coders are definitely agnostic about how they deploy their activities. It is only sad that it seems like a blatant desecration of the season, where the faithful will have to be wary about the Bible apps that they use.

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More from ProofPoint: https://www.proofpoint.com/threat-insight/post/Risky-Mobile-Apps-Steal-Data

More from Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/12/16/android-google-play-malware-in-bibles-qurans

More from Softpedia: https://news.softpedia.com/news/there-are-more-malicious-bible-apps-than-there-are-malicious-poker-apps-497768.shtml

More from InfoSecurity: https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/religious-apps-put-on-high-risk

ProofPoint’s Official Website: https://www.proofpoint.com