A significant jump in malware attacks has been seen targeting Android since the past year. Along with the jump in the number of attacks, the sophistication of the viruses and worms has also been increasing. In order to avoid becoming a victim, people should make themselves aware of the current environment and move to protect themselves.

Cellular-news brings us a well written report along with some statistics to help wake up expectations on the next year’s threats,

Smartphones running Java-based applications saw the second highest increase in malware reports, up 45 per cent on 2009. Reported exploits aimed at the iPhone declined, whilst new Symbian malware also fell by 11 per cent. WinCE-based viruses rose by seven per cent.

“With the increasing pervasiveness of Smartphone devices, 2010 has undoubtedly been the year that fraudsters have truly turned their attention to mobile platforms,” says Gareth Maclachlan, Chief Operating Officer, AdaptiveMobile. “The vast majority of consumers are acutely aware of the threats that PC-based viruses, spam messages and phishing emails pose, but many are still unaware of the risks associated with their mobile devices.

“With Smartphone penetration reported to reach 37 per cent in Europe and 44 per cent in the US by 2012,* we predict that the number of threats targeted at unsuspecting mobile users will continue to increase at an exponential rate throughout the course of 2011. Even more significantly, the nature of the threats we are seeing will increase in sophistication. Whereas the majority of existing threats target either SMS, voice, email or web, the next year will see the emergence of the ‘compound threat’ – intelligent scams designed to exploit multiple phone capabilities in order to reap maximum reward for the criminals, before the user even realises they have become a victim.”

The mention of compound-threats in the article really should hammer the point home for many smartphone users (not just Android) because these types of worms rely on a users lack of understanding. Good examples of strong compound threats were the ILOVEYOU e-mail worm which required user interaction to spread and manage to infect 50-million computers. As smartphone software sets to protect itself from natural exploits that would allow worms to propagate on their own, social-engineering worms will emerge to take advantage of users who just click on things sent to them.

Worse, a lot of smartphone owners still look at these mobile devices as phones and not miniature computers. The average smartphone is a very powerful little computer with a lot of capability behind it and a lot of us store a great deal of personal information in them that could readily ruin us if it were to suddenly become public. Malware for smartphones is going to come out of the app ecology, after all, the best place for viruses to proliferate is going to be in the jungle of social interaction between phones. For those so interested, here’s a short list of tips for keeping your smartphone more secure.

The industry itself has been reacting to the evolution of these threats as well with companies like Juniper Networks providing security and EMC’s SecurID for authentication. Back in October, Citrix even got into the tips game—including mobile security—due to the increasing proliferation of mobile devices themselves. As with all of the above, good password and computer hygiene and sanitary habits will protect most users.