In Russia increased the number of smartphones with viruses

At the same time, attackers continue to actively use phishing resources for their schemes and try to access accounts in messengers to make fraudulent calls.

Throughout the summer months of 2026, the number of blocked suspicious calls remained lower than last year. In June, the indicator decreased by 31% year-on-year, in July - by 41%, and in August - by 75%. This is primarily due to the active fight against telephone fraud by the state and business. At the same time, a surge characteristic of last summer in August, when Russians begin to return from vacations, did not happen this year. If in 2025, August accounted for more than half of all suspicious calls blocked during the season, in 2026 their volume was distributed between the three months of summer almost evenly. In September, the indicator also decreased by another 3% compared to August, and year-on-year by 73%.

MegaFon experts also note the continuing trend of “hijacking” user accounts in messengers, which scammers then use for calls. For kidnappings, they use social engineering, malware or offer owners to rent out an account for money.

According to MegaFon experts, the number of phishing resources remains at a consistently high level. Such sites mask as banks, marketplaces, government and other portals familiar to users to get logins, passwords, payment data and other confidential information. Among the identified phishing sites, the leading categories of resources related to investments and cryptocurrencies (30%), as well as social networks and instant messengers (21%). The top 5 also included resources with potentially malicious Android application installation files – APK files (9%), payment gateways (8%) and fake news sites (7%). At the same time, individual sites can belong to several categories at once.

This summer, the spread of viruses for smartphones showed no less high dynamics. We are talking primarily about Trojans for devices on the Android operating system. Such applications can independently install other programs without the owner’s knowledge, intercept notifications, create remote access to a smartphone, steal personal data and monitor the user. From June to August 2026, the number of subscribers on whose devices malware was detected increased by 34% compared to the same period in 2025, and the most noticeable increase was in August – 77%.

“We’ve seen a steady trend in mobile malware applications for months now.” Moreover, we found cases that combine both fraudulent calls and the installation of infected software. A person falls under the influence of an attacker who can convince him to do anything: transfer money to “safe accounts”, give cash to a courier and so on. And in order to control the victim 24/7 and change the attack vector, convince them to install a spy Trojan on the device under the guise of legal software. To reduce the risk of infection, it is important to install applications only from official stores, do not follow suspicious links, regularly update the operating system and use anti-virus software, said Sergey Khrenov, Director of the Department of Fraud Prevention and Income Loss at MegaFon