Truecaller unveiled TrueSDK which enables third party apps to easily on-board users with their Truecaller profile and their Truecaller verified phone number. This service can be used by developers to sign up, update a user’s information or purely verify the user’s phone number based identity in their mobile apps through user consent. Available to registered third party apps & currently Android only, this feature is launched with 12 partners who have on-boarded to simplify the app on-boarding and user verification process. Some of our esteemed partners include India’s popular apps namely Quikr, Mobikwik, redBus, CarDekho, BharatMatrimony, ixigo, OYO Rooms, TO THE NEW Digital, FreshMenu, Terraa, Cash Care & ShopClues

Nami Zarringhalam, Chief Strategy Officer & Co-founder of Truecaller said

At Truecaller, our mission has always been to provide as much information as possible to users about their calls and enabling them to use that information in meaningful ways. In this process, we realized the power and importance of a mobile number, especially when it comes to personal identification. Our aim is to empower third party apps with a credible verification option and enable users to use the app of their choice by making their phone numbers their identity.

TrueSDK helps both the users to quickly use their credentials that are already verified with Truecaller to easily engage with 3rd party apps of their choice.

[L-R] Kari Krishnamurthy – VP Growth & Partnerships Asia and Country Manager Truecaller, Nami Zarringhalam – Co founder and CSO Truecaller, Priyam Bose – Director Worldwide Dev

Commenting on the newly launched platform, Priyam Bose, Director Worldwide Developer Relations at Truecaller said

Phone numbers are quickly becoming the primary personal identity to verify users in the global mobile arena. App Developers are looking for ways to minimize friction in user on-boarding & engagement flows. TrueSDK gives developers an opportunity to fulfill these needs and overtime bridge offline and online identity gap. Instead of having every app developer build and maintain their own systems, they can now use TrueSDK and instead focus more on their core aspects of their app led offering.

Offering’s of TrueSDK

• Phone number based on-boarding and verification
• Free to use and no verification cost for existing Truecaller users
• Significantly reduces friction in user on boarding
• Permission based flow
• Light weight client side SDK and minimal changes needed on developer’s back-end

Anurag Saran, CPO-Chief Product Officer, Quikr added

As one of India’s most trusted brands, security of consumers while transacting on our platform is crucial. Truecaller has a large existing community and the integration of TrueSDK on our mobile app reduces friction for mobile number verification. This gives our consumers an added layer of convenience and security.

Bipin Preet Singh, Founder & CEO-Mobikwik said

At Mobikwik, we’re taking every step keeping customer experience at the centre of focus. By integrating TrueSDK from Truecaller, we look forward to solve many challenges in one shot in our app. Our users while signing up on Mobikwik now will have an auto fill mechanism with their Truecaller verified phone number. Verified phone number based user on-boarding will significantly reduce friction in the user journey and minimise drop-off’s which could be a key in the entire consumer engagement life-cycle.

More reactions from TrueSDK partners

ShopClues is one of the first in the industry to move to the use of verified phone numbers for user registration on our app by tying up with TrueSDK from Truecaller. ShopClues is committed to making the user journey as smooth and seamless as possible. By using Truecaller verified phone number-led credentials we are ensuring that the customers’ propensity to on-board with us is enhanced.

Sanjay Sethi, CEO & Co-founder, ShopClues

By integrating our app with a solution such as the TrueSDK we are solving many problems at one go. Users will no longer need to fill in information manually with the auto-fill option. By auto filling their contact credentials we will be able to considerably reduce friction in user journey. Additionally, owing to the vast user community of Truecaller we will have ready access to a bank of verified phone numbers making the process much simpler and safer.  Going forward, we consider this to be a big step in enhancing our in-app experience.

Rajnish Kumar, Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer (CTO), ixigo

TrueSDK is the first major product to offer verified phone number based sign up/login feature. For OYO Rooms, where we are mobile first and use phone number for user account creation, this really helps in reducing customer friction in signing up. With Truecaller’s large user base, we hope this feature will benefit a large number of our users.

Anurag Gaggar, VP, Products, OYO Rooms

We are pretty excited to partner with Truecaller which has an extensive customer base with verified phone numbers. Personalization on a fast-growing growing channel mobile is key to our success and we strongly believe that this partnership will help us ease the process of signup which is a pre-requisite to our personalization efforts

Krishnan Ramaswami, Head of Products, Analytics and Acquisition Marketing- redBus

CarDekho believes in making our user’s experience seamless and frictionless. The potential of integrating with Truecaller promises authentic details without making users fill forms or enter OTP for verification. We are certain such innovative solutions will be accepted enthusiastically by consumers.

Rahul Yadav, Director-Products, CarDekho

All our profiles carry a verified phone number. The TrueSDK helps the Truecaller user to verify the phone number but also auto fill personal details while registering for Bharat Matrimony App for a seamless experience.

R Chandrasekar, Chief Technology Officer and Information Officer, BharatMatrimony

We are excited to partner with Truecaller on TrueSDK integration with our TV Everywhere and OTT Video platform apps ‘Video-ready’. The True SDK is a revolutionary concept for Video applications as it aids in significant improvements to User Experience by enabling a seamless and verified phone number based authentication process as well as allowing applications to understand the user journey in much more detail and useful ways. The same data can be used in aiding to multiple experiences across personalised content and user engagement.

Dave Mann, EVP-Video Solutions, TO THE NEW Digital

TrueSDK is currently only available for selected partners on Android platform, but will be open to public in near future. To sign up for TrueSDK contact truesdk@truecaller.com with your app details.

Cheetah Mobile, the world’s leading mobile utility provider committed to providing a safer, faster and simpler mobile internet experience, announced findings from its latest global mobile security report focused on Android devices.

The report details the growth of viruses, phishing sites, malware’s, infected devices across major markets [including India], data leakages, and rounds out with security predictions for 2016. The Company’s annual security report is cumulative data based on 567 million global monthly active users and an overall install base of almost two billion users using Cheetah Mobile’s utility applications on their devices.

Key trends in mobile security for 2015

Android viruses rose sharply

The number of Android viruses exceeded 9.5 million, which is larger than twice the total number in the past three years. Compared with 2014’s 2.8million, the growth rate of 2015 is over 22%.

Root Trojans soared in 2015

As it gains system-level privilege, Root Trojans can take complete control of the device and are very hard to remove.

Mobile payments have been targeted by viruses

With the popularization of mobile payment, the number of malware’s targeting mobile banking has increased rapidly.

Data leakage caused great damage

Thousands of companies and hundreds of millions of users have been affected by information leaks in 2015.

Android vulnerabilities emerge one after another

From the Stage fright vulnerability which affected 95% Android devices to the wormhole compromising millions, it seemed like Android vulnerabilities would never end.

China, India and Indonesia were the three most severely afflicted countries. Apart from large Android user bases, another reason of these countries becoming the worst-hit ones is that third-party app markets are prevailing in these areas, and most of these third-party app markets have been contaminated by malware’s due to the weak monitoring of third-party app markets.

Biggest Data Leaks

• Anthem: 80 million customers’ and employees’ personal information
• OPM: About 27 million employees’ and applicants’ personal information
• Ashley Madison: 37 million users’ personal information
• Hacking Team: 400 GB of data was leaked and scattered on the internet

The graph above represents the number of unique infections detected across all devices that Cheetah Mobile is present on in that market. This number doesn’t represent the total number of devices that Cheetah Mobile’s applications are installed on in that particular country but only the individual devices that were infected over the span of 2015.

In the graphs below, one each for China, the United States & India, the numbers showcase the number of infections overall. The data here means that a single device could have multiple infections multiple times over the course of a year.

Total infections in India: 11,170,960

Total infections in China: 10,461,684

Total infections in America: 9,007,913

Here’s an image depicting the Trojans causing the most infections among devices in India

A Trojan horse or Trojan is a type of malware that is often disguised as legitimate software. Trojans can be employed by cyber-thieves & hackers trying to gain access to users’ systems. Users are typically tricked by some form of social engineering into loading and executing Trojans on their systems.

The manner in which they behave differs – some hides in users’ mobile devices to steal text messages, contact information, location data, and even personal photos. Others, like Ghost Push, obtains root access to the affected device and installs more malicious apps and a never ending stream of ads.

Mobile Security Predictions for 2016

• New security features in Android 5.0 Lollipop and its successors are expected to make Android phones more secure.
• As Google Play is available in China, Chinese app markets are expected to become more standardized and secure.
• More effective steps will be taken by Google to enhance Android security in 2016.
• Globally, mobile payment methods will be attacked more frequently.

For more in-depth data on the state of Mobile Security in 2015, you can refer the detailed report released by Cheetah Mobile

[Image Credit* – Cheetah Mobile]

Increasing use of banking apps on smartphone are set to cause nightmare to consumers and financial institution as per the predictions for 2016 by Trend Micro. Reports say that 3 in 4 apps in India are malicious. Irrespective of the slow adoption rate of mobile payment apps, the introduction of next generation mobile payment systems will inspire a renewed interest for threat actors to carry out real-world testing to steal information from new payment processing technologies like EMV credit cards, contactless RFID credit cards, and mobile wallets like Apple Pay and Google Wallet.

In 2016, the improved security brought by these modes of payment will be challenged by online criminals. Google, on the other hand, released a report that says less than 1% of apps found in Android devices are potentially harmful. Based on the data gathered by Trend Micro as predictions for 2016, this distinction stands, showing that 13% of apps found in Play Store are found to be malicious while Google Play only registered 0.16% malicious apps. This will not be felt in other countries where users typically turn to official app stores for their apps.

Mobile malware will also continue to affect users in India due to the availability of third-party platforms and channels that offer free app downloads. Google Play, for example, is available in India, but reaches only 21 million of the estimated 800 million Chinese mobile users. Given this user behavior, there is no stopping the exponential growth of mobile malware at a rate that’s projected to reach the 20 million mark by the end of 2016.

Online threats will evolve to rely more on mastering the psychology behind each scheme than mastering the technical aspects of the operation. Attackers will continue to use fear as its main tool, as it has proven to be effective in the past.

About Trend Micro

Trend Micro Incorporated, a global leader in security software, strives to make the world safe for exchanging digital information. Trend Micro enables the smart protection of information, with innovative security technology that is simple to deploy and manage, and fits an evolving ecosystem. Their solutions are powered by cloud-based global threat intelligence, the Trend Micro™ Smart Protection Network™ infrastructure & are supported by more than 1,200 threat experts around the globe.  For more information, visit TrendMicro

Cheetah Mobile, a leading mobile Internet company with approximately 567 million mobile monthly active users, has introduced a new feature in CM Locker for combating smartphone theft. The new feature – GPS tracker, helps users track down stolen smartphone by automatically sending an email of the phone location once the intruder attempts to access CM Locker protected phone.

Combining with the existent Intruder Selfie function, which automatically sends selfie of intruder after three failed attempts of accessing CM Locker protected phone are made. CM Locker helps prevent phone theft and safeguards users’ privacy on daily basis.

Smartphone Theft’s in India

Smartphone theft is a growing problem in India. 37,878 mobile thefts were registered in 2014 out of which Delhi accounted for 16,362 complaints, three times as high as Maharashtra’s 5,697, the second highest. The other major states with a high count of mobile theft cases are West Bengal [2,049], Uttar Pradesh [1,798], Karnataka [1,750] and Bihar [1,591].

The Indian government has an online portal known as ZIPNET [Zonal Integrated Police Network] which lists stolen mobile phones in addition to other information. Currently, Delhi, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Punjab and Chandigarh Police share information on this portal. Considering the rising phone theft issue in India, it is an advantage that CM Locker is now available for download in Hindi.

CM Locker – Features

CM Locker’s email alerts act as a big deterrent to smartphone thieves and will help in curbing the increasing theft in the country. Launched at the end of 2014, CM Locker quickly shot up to around 10 million downloads on Google Play. With an average user rating of 4.7 stars in just 4 months, it is the highest rated security locker in the world providing the speedy, safe, and simple user experience.

In addition to safeguarding user’s privacy, CM Locker also improves battery performance via automatically shutting down battery draining apps running in the background. The app is equipped with phone boosting feature for optimizing the overall speed of the phone.

Moreover, CM Locker is packed with different wallpapers and themes for customization, three types of password modes including fingerprint, a fully integrated weather forecast function and many other impressive features.

CM Locker can be downloaded here

[Image Credit* – CM Locker]

About Cheetah Mobile Inc

Cheetah Mobile is a leading mobile internet company. The Company aims to provide the best apps for mobile users worldwide, while building a leading global mobile ad platform for advertisers. Cheetah Mobile had approximately 567 million global mobile monthly active users in September 2015. Its mission critical applications, including Clean Master, CM Security, Battery Doctor and Duba Anti-virus, help make the internet and mobile experience speedier, simpler, and safer for users worldwide. For more information, please visit Cheetah Mobile