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Comment by ntakasaki | Hacker News Reader

Except all the malware on Android. But who's counting?

https://www.google.com/search?&q=android+malware&ie=UTF-8&oe...

I'm pretty sure virtually none of the spam mails in my spamfilter were sent from a phone. Nor do phones have the bandwidth to carry out DDoS attacks or host phishing sites. Nor do many people do onlinebanking on their phone (though that number is certainly on the rise).

So yes, while malware exists on android, I doubt the total damages caused by it are more than a drop in the bucket when compared to windows malware.

Your original statement was:

>Practically every instance of malware runs on Microsoft Windows.

Even according to Google, about 5 million Android devices are infected with malware. http://bgr.com/2014/06/26/google-on-android-malware-and-secu...

I would suppose that your statements aren't support by fact, but the HN downvotes have got me thinking.

If "5 million" sounds like a large number to you then this may help to put it into perspective; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet#Historical_list_of_botne...

First, were you referring to instances of malware, not membership in botnets. Second, we disagree on the meaning of the phrase "practically every".

Instances of malware must necessarily be >= sizes of botnets.

Goole said "Well less than 0.5% have ever had a problem", you quote a blog that turns that into "up to five million have ever had malware" which shows some ignorance of statistics, and then you turn that into "about five million are infected with malware now".

The downvotes are because you're derailing the thread with something that is completely off-topic.

Android botnets are very valuable because they use mobile network IPs that confuse fraud and login classifiers that use ASN or GeoIP.

That is certainly true. But in terms of scale even a claimed 5 million compromised android phones just barely registers while desktop botnets of six times that size are discovered.

The bandwidth constraints imposed by most users draconic data plans and the realities of limited battery life further put a fairly low cap on what a mobile botnet can do in this day and age. (both of which admittedly will hopefully change sooner rather than later...)

Pretty much all botnets target consumer devices and thus have ip addresses that are common for consumer devices. I'm not sure I buy that a mobile IP is worth more than a Comcast one, especially factoring in the available bandwidth.

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