There is a new threat to security that potentially puts at risk of intrusion nearly one billion mobile devices with the Android operating system. Because of a flaw in the software, discovered by security company Zimperium, smartphones can be ‘infected’ with the reception of a simple multimedia message (MMS) sent by hackers. Criminals just need to know the phone number of the victims.
The vulnerability is called Stagefright and allows hackers to get hold of your data by sending a simple MMS. The victim does not even open or view the message: just send only to infect the smartphone
explained Joshua Drake , vice president for research of Zimperium. Once “entered” in the device the hacker can activate many functions, including the microphone and audio recording. The vulnerability, said Drake, covers 95% of Android devices (smartphones and tablets), about 950 million. All the Android versions from 2.2 onward are vulnerable.
Google has made available “patches” – The threat is known to Google, which has already released a “patch “to its partners. However it may take time before all the models that support Android to be updated. At the moment there is no evidence that the flaw has been exploited effectively. Drake will present his discovery in August at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas.
No one until now has been hit by the virus – “This vulnerability has been identified in a laboratory environment on old Android devices and, to our knowledge, no one has been hit by the virus. As soon as we are aware, we immediately activated to send to our partners a bug fix to protect users, “Google said in a statement.
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