Analysis of mobile banking malware on the Android operating system

The Android platform is the fastest growing smartphone operating system to date. Consequently, malware on Android OS has been increasing at an alarming rate. Similar to Windows-based malware, Android malware also have different families which are responsible for different malicious activities. In this thesis, we focused on one particular group of Android malware which is designed to target banks and financial institutions. These banking malware use different techniques to attack bank clients and banking servers. A coherent framework to analyse the behaviour of these malware needs to be developed, so the impact of theirs attacks could be minimised. This thesis investigates a systematic analysis to understand these malware’s behaviour and distribution method. From public and private sources, 37 samples of banking malware have been collected which represent eight major Android Banking malware families. In addition, we also analysed malware source code by reverse engineering all malware samples. As a result of analysis, a clear overview and better understanding of mobile banking malware on Android OS was established. The results indicated that Android banking malware is evolving in technique and will become more difficult to analyse in the future.Masters by Researc