A Survey on Andro-Financial Malware Attacks, Detection Methods and Current Issues

Android is open source and the most popular operating system. Increased popularity and dependency on Smartphone have instigated attackers to exploit Android vulnerabilities for monetary benefits. Over the past decade, various malware attacks had been reported. These days, the most popular as well as threatening mobile malware is stealth malware. These are special malware used to extort money in return of access and data without user’s consent. Stealth attacks like Ransomware are responsible for the loss of not only money and data but may also result in loss of reputation. Emerging trends such as ransomware-as-a-service, crypto-mining, IOT based devices, smart devices and cloud-based devices have too encourages the spread of ransomware. There exist many solutions for malware analysis and detection in existing literature. Significant malware analysis and detection technique from the ten years have been referred and to the best of our knowledge, contemporary techniques sans precision and perfection. Articles were mainly taken from reputed journals to build the corpus for study. This work presents comprehensive survey on stealth malware. Major countermeasures are oriented towards primitive malware detection techniques. The study of existing frameworks helped to produce a literature summary. Future researchers may carefully observe literature gap to work on lacking areas. One of main contribution of this study to provide present state of art and a few still open problems in the field of Android stealth malware.