According to a latest research report over 50% of the Android devices worldwide contain unpatched vulnerabilities. These unpatched security holes can be exploited by malware attackers to take control of users Android devices.
The report comes Duo Security, a security firm that released an Android app X-Ray few months back. X-Ray scans for vulnerabilities in the mobile operating system itself instead of scanning for malicious apps. It can identify known, yet unpatched vulnerabilities in the mobile platform itself that could be exploited to take full control of users’ phones., Wrote Duo Security CTO, Jon Oberheide on the company’s blog.
This problem is because of the Android ecosystem and how updates to Android devices are handled by manufacturers and carriers. Google doesn’t push updates directly to devices, but it is the duty of manufacturers and carriers to push timely updates to keep their customers’ devices secure. But often manufacturers and carriers won’t push updates and sometimes release devices with old versions of the OS installed and they never get updates to the latest version.
Based on the statistics collected from 20,000 X-Ray installed Android devices, they are claiming that half of the Android devices worldwide have unpatched vulnerabilities that could be exploited by a malicious app or attacker. The results of this report will be presented at the United Summit Conference on Friday in San Francisco.
Via BGR
