OMG! Have you heard? Half of all Android devices have unpatched vulnerabilities, and are out there, sharing the same air as we are! The horror!
That's the feeling you'll get if you poke around the Internet today and read a blog or two, where folks are talking about a study from Duo Security, a company that sells authentication software to be used on smartphones. They even have a nifty little app you can install to check your Android device to see if it's vulnerable. The app isn't in Google Play, but it's linked at the bottom of the post if you want to check it out yourself.
Sounds scary, right? That's 50 percent of Android phones, all over the world, all unpatched and ripe for some sort of online hacking has got to be bad. It's the end for Google and Android, and we're all screwed.
Just. Stop.
Here's what's going on. The app you can download runs and scans your device to see if any of eight popular root exploit holes are still open. These are things that were patched in more recent versions of Android or newer versions of the Linux kernel. If your phone or tablet is unpatched, you'll get a warning about it. It's all above-the-board, and these exploits probably are unpatched in 50 percent of Android phones.
But what about the other thousands of exploits, or the ones that haven't been made public yet? You can't just use the eight easy ones and call it a day. My Galaxy Nexus is safe, according to this app, but it's sitting there with an unlocked bootloader, rooted, and ready for bad things to happen. You're not getting the full story from this app -- or from the blogs out there talking about it.
But we can help.
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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/i22qfmHoOgc/story01.htm
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