HACKERS CAN UNLEASH NEW ANDROIDS TOO - BEWARE!

HACKERS CAN UNLEASH NEW ANDROIDS TOO - BEWARE!

Android : google’s mobile operating system platform has been found to be dangerously prone to unauthenticated access. A number of security flaws have been detected in the android system pastly.

The Multitasking feature of android phones is the vector where all the problems reside.

The Stagefright Vulnerability (affecting 950 million android devices),The Critical Media Server Vulnerability (affecting 55% of android devices) and The Critical Flaw (affecting all the versions of android devices) are some basic security flaws that may put your device to unwanted risk.

The security fallacy, according to the researchers ,allows the hacker to keep a watch on the Android smartphone owners, extort login credentials, install malware etc.

Attack strategy:

Recent researches reveal that the fault can trap the victim in such a way that the user will unknowingly hand over the login details into a misrepresented user interface administered by the hacker on initiating any app.

A paper titled, "Towards Discovering and Understanding Task Hijacking in Android" presented a research report detailing the practical differences in multitasking within an android and a desktop.

Multitasking in Android allows us to  to switch between the apps, to maintain app states in background too.

Attacks hijacking tasks:

The abrupt Security risks are a major threat to Android task management mechanism.

The Multitasking features may adversely allow task hijacking attacks on a large scale, if maltreated.

According to a Research, since many Android apps depend on “the current multitasking design”, task-hijacking flaw is prevalent in almost all apps. And defeating this hijacking is not easy. The fallacy can also mirror the user interface  administered by the hacker on the other end.

Not done yet….!

The users can be trapped by Ransomware, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and other cyber attacks in the coming future.

The five security researchers –

• Peng Liu and Chuangang Ren from the Pennsylvania State University, and

• Yulong Zhang, Tao Wei and Hui Xue from FireEye

have reported the security hole to the Android team.

Google has appreciated the research and has said that this will lead them to a strong and unbreakable Android security system.

Meanwhile, Customers are protected from hijacking and phishing attacks with the help of Android’s Verify Apps and Safety Net features, says Google.