New vulnerabilities were discovered in Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs (systems on a chip) that leave billions of Android device users open for hackers to attack, says Trend Micro Researcher, Wish Wu.
Snapdragon processors, which power a large amount of Android smartphones on the market today, were discovered to contain serious flaws that if exploited, would allow hackers to gain root access to a device via a malicious app. With root access, an attacker can basically do anything they want with a device, from scraping it for data, installing other malicious apps, making calls, sending texts stealing login credentials and more.
While Trend Micro was quick to report the vulnerabilities to Google, and Google promptly released a patch, unfortunately, many Android users are still susceptible to the attack. Unlike Apple’s iOS firmware updates that release to all devices at the same time the Android family of devices is so diverse that the deployment of patches in fragmented.
Some of the notable devices vulnerable to the Snapdragon flaws are Nexus 5, 6, 6P and The Samsung Galaxy Note Edge but there are many others. Currently, only Google Nexus devices have an available patch. The patch addresses devices running Android KitKat 4.4.4 through Marshmallow 6.0.1, but any devices with earlier firmware have not received a patch.
If you are an Android user, running KitKat, Lollipop or Marshmallow firmware, you should check now if a patch is available for your device and install it. To do so, go to the Settings app>About>Systems Update.
For more details on the Snapdragon vulnerabilities visit TrendMicro’s official blog report, here.
