Amid rising concerns about mobile malware, a group of security researchers is launching an initiative to improve collaboration around mobile threat analysis. They want to encourage researchers to share their malware samples with each other and work together to identify and catalog the hostile software.
The effort, which is led by researchers at NC State, is called the . The name alludes to the scientific undertaking of gene mapping. The security researchers similarly aim to unravel the constituent parts of Android malware and figure out how it all fits together. They hope that this will eventually pave the way for coming up with better and more proactive defense mechanisms.
According to the project’s website, the malware research collected by NC State has already been shared with 27 other organizations around the world. The recipients appear to all be universities and technology companies.