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New Vulnerabilities Affect Over 900 Million Android Devices, Enable Complete Control of Devices

posted by janrinok on Monday August 08 2016, @06:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the oops dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

QuadRooter Android vulnerabilities affect devices that are built on the Qualcomm chipset, a supplier of 80% of the chipsets in the Android ecosystem. If any one of the four vulnerabilities is exploited, an attacker can trigger privilege escalations and gain root access to a device, enabling them to change or remove system-level files, delete or add apps, and access the device's screen, camera or microphone.

Source: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2016/08/08/quadrooter-android-vulnerabilities/

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 08 2016, @09:16PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 08 2016, @09:16PM (#385466)

    There goes all of India. And China.

    How did we get a Linux based OS to be like the next Windoze?

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  • (Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Monday August 08 2016, @09:38PM

    by Hyperturtle (2824) on Monday August 08 2016, @09:38PM (#385479)

    Well... if you got what you paid for with Android, I hope the hardware is good.

  • (Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday August 08 2016, @10:25PM

    by LoRdTAW (3755) on Monday August 08 2016, @10:25PM (#385511) Journal

    How did we get a Linux based OS to be like the next Windoze?

    Shit userspace engineering. Redhat/Linux and Android/Linux are the two biggest turds spoiling the Linux ecosystem.

  • (Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Monday August 08 2016, @11:48PM

    by stormwyrm (717) on Monday August 08 2016, @11:48PM (#385545) Journal
    By leaving updates up to manufacturers whose best interest is in getting you to buy their next new and shiny, removing any incentive for them to update the devices you buy from them to fix vulnerabilities like this. Google could mandate that anyone who wants to use the Android trademark to describe their devices must provide updates for at least two years, and that might mitigate the issue, but I don't know that if they did this it would go over well. Google seems to be in matters like this at the mercy of the larger manufacturers like Samsung, who would, I think, just give Google the middle finger and stop describing their phones as Android phones if they tried to pull something like this, or migrate all their devices to Tizen out of spite.
    --
    Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by choose another one on Tuesday August 09 2016, @11:22AM

    by choose another one (515) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 09 2016, @11:22AM (#385718)

    How did we get a Linux based OS to be like the next Windoze?

    By winning the popularity contest and making it the biggest target.

    For years some people have been saying that Linux was inherently more secure than Windows by design - they are (and were) wrong.

    The relative amount of malware and vulnerabilities for Linux and Windows on the desktop reflects the relative popularity - nothing more. On phones the situation is reversed, and lo and behold Windows Phone is really secure, because... no one cares.

    [There is a dissenting opinion, e.g. http://betanews.com/2015/06/11/windows-phone-security-is-top-notch-says-kaspersky/ [betanews.com] , which implies that MS is actually better at security than Linux but we'll ignore that because open source just can't be less secure than proprietary by design...]

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 09 2016, @04:03PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 09 2016, @04:03PM (#385812)

    Thanks to Redhat and Pottering, I've been saying that about Linux in general.