UC Browser and UC Browser Mini Android were found to have exposed over 500 million of its users to MiTM attacks - a "man in the middle" attack made possible by downloading and installing additional modules over non-secure HTTP.
With so many users potentially affected, we were curious to see where UC Browser is most popular. As we learned when investigating the most popular mobile browsers, UC rarely made the top five in the countries we examined. However, 500 million is a big number, so let's dig a bit deeper.
Where is UC Browser most popular?
Below are the countries where UC Browser has the highest share according to our data.
UC Browser in the rest of the world
Below is the market share for UC Browser in the top ten most populated European countries, as well as the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Market share is low overall, under 2% in all but five countries. Four of those five (Pakistan, Brazil, Bangladesh and Indonesia) have huge populations, over 840 million combined, so the threat is real.
As of today (March 29th) UC Browser and its variants are still available in the Play store. According to Dr.Web, who first discovered the vulnerability, neither the app creators nor Google themselves have taken any action on the findings:
Owners of Android devices should independently decide whether to continue using these programs or remove them and wait until they are updated to fix potential vulnerabilities.
The news highlights the importance of network monitoring and malware prevention. Should a device with UC Browser installed fall foul of the potential threats disclosed by Dr.Web, a corporate network to which it is connected could suffer some serious consequences.
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All statistics represent the share of web traffic in selected countries based on mobile visits tracked by DeviceAtlas.
