Android Hackers Diversifying How They Attack Devices

Google’s Android platform has a reputation for being vulnerable to hacking and malware, but the reality is that developers and hackers are continuing to play the a coding cat and mouse game. There are many scary statistics used in headlines detailing the number of devices that are potentially vulnerable to a security flaw. Stagefright was seen as being a potential hazard to around a billion devices, and the latest big name issue,Quadrooter, which is seen as being a potential threat to around 900 million Qualcomm-powered Android devices. We are seeing hackers and security investigators uncovering deeper and deeper issues in the Android platform code, but this points towards something often overlooked: the deeper we must investigate to find a critical glitch, the more hardened the outer layers of the operating system are. This is a simplistic perspective, but read on.

Mobile device security developers like to release scary statistics almost as though they are trying to frighten potential customers into downloading and using their safer-device products. For example, mobile security solution provider, 360 Security, explained earlier in the year that the damage attributed to mobile ransomware for all of 2015 amounted to 95.6 billion won (approximately £65 million or $86 million). Their statistics show that 900,000 devices were infected between June 2013 and the first quarter 2016. Another security business, AhnLab, collected almost 50,000 malicious app samples in the first half of 2016 designed to root a device. Once a device is rooted – that is, once third party applications can gain access to the whole of the storage and not just the ordinarily permitted space – the device is effectively compromised and can be made to do pretty much anything the developers want it to. AhnLab explain that the number of rooting applications is around four times that of the second half of 2015 – this is a relatively new trend in mobile device malware. For the full article click here

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