Security researchers believe they have found a major security
flaw in the Google’s Android mobile operating system, which could affect
up to 99 percent of Android phones now in consumers’ hands.
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| ANDROID |
In results published Wednesday by the Bluebox Security research firm,
chief technology officer Jeff Forristal said the flaw gave hackers a “master
key” into the Android system.The problem lies in the security verification
process that has been used on the Google Play applications store since the
release of Android 1.6. It could leave up to 900 million devices open to
hackers. The flaw, the research firm said, is a weakness in the way that
Android applications verify changes to their code. The weakness would allow
hackers to “turn any legitimate application into a malicious Trojan” without
flagging the attention of Google’s app store, a mobile phone or the person
using an application.The result, researchers said, would be that anyone who
breaks into an app this way would have access to the data that app collects and
— if an app made by the device manufacturer gets exploited — could even “take
over normal functioning of a phone.”