Morocco Ranks 4th Globally in Mobile Cybersecurity Threats Amid COVID-19 Surge

More than 5.68 million malicious installation programs, more than 156,000 new mobile banking Trojans and more than 20,000 new mobile ransomware Trojans, this is the picture of mobile threats recorded by Kaspersky’s mobile products and technologies for the year 2020. The main reason cited by the hackers who became active in the second half of 2020 is Covid-19, notes the Kaspersky annual report.

In the top 5 countries most affected by these mobile threats, Iran is in the lead with 67.78% of users concerned, followed by Algeria with 31.29%, Bangladesh, 26.18%. Morocco is 4th with 22.67% and Nigeria, 22%. Regarding mobile banking Trojans, the ranking is rather different. Here, Japan is in the lead with 2.83%, followed by Taiwan (0.87%), Spain (0.77%), Italy with 0.71% and Turkey (0.60%). For mobile ransomware, by country in number of users, the United States occupies the first place with 2.25% of users concerned, followed by Kazakhstan with 0.77%, Iran with 0.35%, China (0.21%) and Italy (0.14%). But the detection of adware remained almost stable, at a high level of infection.

The study conducted by Kaspersky and the Immersion research firm in 2020 in Morocco reveals that only 8% of mobile users use an antivirus solution on their mobile, although out of 10, more than 7 people protect their mobile against physical intrusion with facial recognition techniques, unlock patterns or PIN codes. This means that in the kingdom, "online threat" is less of a concern for Moroccans than "physical threat" such as theft of the device. This also proves that awareness of the importance of security against mobile threats is largely insufficient in the kingdom.