San Francisco, Feb 22 (IANS): Almost 100,000 new variants of mobile banking Trojans strains were spotted in 2021, says a new report.

According to Securelist, it detected 97,661 installation packages for mobile banking Trojans, which is down 59,049 from the previous year.

"The largest contributors to the statistics were the Trojan-Banker.AndroidOS.Agent (37.69 per cent of all detected banking Trojans), Trojan-Banker.AndroidOS.Bray (21.08 per cent) and Trojan-Banker.AndroidOS.Fakecalls (9.91 per cent) families," the company said in a statement.

In 2021, Japan ranked first by share of unique users attacked by mobile bankers (2.18 per cent).

Silver belongs to Spain (1.55 per cent), where Trojan-Banker.AndroidOS.Bian.h was most often encountered (28.97 per cent). And bronze goes to Turkey (0.71 per cent), where Trojan-Banker.AndroidOS.Agent.ep (32.22 per cent) leads the way.

Another interesting finding in 2021 was the first Gamethief-type mobile Trojan aimed at stealing account credentials for the mobile version of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG).

"After 2020, which was full of newsbreaks and opportunities for masking malware, for example, as Covid19 trackers or video conferencing apps, the pandemic topic gradually faded in the reporting year," the report said.

"There were no new global cybercriminal trends. Of the few examples of exploiting a trending topic was the Joker Trojan on Google Play, which masquerades as an app with a background wallpaper in the style of Squid Game," it added.

The report said that, in 2021, it also detected 3,464,756 mobile malicious installation packages, down 2,218,938 from the previous year. Overall, the number of mobile malware installation packages dropped to around 2019 levels.