Over 50% Of Android Devices Worldwide Are Vulnerable To Malware Says New Study
It’s a great thing to be a market leader with devices all around the world but as Windows users can attest to there is a definite downside to that kind of popularity.
With being a market leader your devices also become prime targets for those nasty people out there who enjoy nothing more than writing all kinds of malware and then doing whatever they can to see that your device gets infected.
This is the exactly the position that Android is finding itself as it begins to make a dominant place for itself in the mobile world, a place that has put it directly in the cross-hairs of malware writers and hackers.
To highlight the danger facing the Android market a company called Duo Security released a DARPA-funded Android app called X-Ray whose whole purpose was to look known privilege escalation vulnerabilities that would enable malware authors to gain root access to your Android device.
After launching two months ago the company has already collected results from some 20,000 Android devices worldwide with the startling result being that over half of the Android devices worldwide have unpatched vulnerabilities leaving them open to attack.
Of course one also has to take into account that some of these vulnerabilities will be there because of a lackadaisical attitude from mobile carriers which Duo Security also pointed to:
Duo Security agrees: “We feel this is actually a fairly conservative estimate based on our preliminary results, the current set of vulnerabilities detected by X-Ray, and the current distribution of Android versions globally.” One must remember the demographic that is installing this app. On the one hand, those are those who care more about security, and therefore make a point to install patches. On the other hand, there are those who think there is something wrong with their device, either because it’s malfunctioning or infected, and want to check how bad the situation is.
via The Next Web
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About the Author
Steven Hodson Steven has been around the tech world long enough to see most of the stuff we think of cool happen before which leads to a certain bit of cynicism that has contributed to him being known as the cranky old fart of the Internet. Besides sharing some of the goodness that he finds with you here at 42x you can also find him curating some digital goodness at Winextra (tech type stuff) and Rotten Gumdrops (for your daily dose of WTF).
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