Click to enlarge. Source: U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security
FORTUNE — The memo, prepared by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis and released last Friday, is titled Threats to Mobile Devices Using the Android Operating System. It’s stamped UNCLASSIFIED/FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY, but it’s the kind of information you’d think the government might want to share with the mobile phone buying public as well.
On the face of it, the purpose of the report, unearthed and published by Public Intelligence, is to alert police and other security personnel to the risks of relying on phones that run on Google’s (GOOG) Android platform. Citing Android’s dominant market share and open source software, the report notes that it accounted in 2012 for nearly four out of five malware attacks.
Apple’s (AAPL) iOS, by contrast, accounted for fewer than one in a 100.
But given that the report also includes a handy summary to the most prominent forms of mobile malware (copied below) it could also serve as a primer for cops interested in tapping into mobile devices for their own purposes.
The Next Web‘s Josh Ong notes that as bad as Android looked in the government’s alert, it looked worse in Juniper Networks‘ third annual malware survey, which reported in June that Google’s OS was responsible for 92% of all mobile malware
LINK: Threats to Mobile Devices Using the Android Operating System (pdf).
