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Android Security in 2016 is a Mess

posted by mrpg on Tuesday December 06 2016, @09:35PM   Printer-friendly
from the and-wait-for-2017 dept.

"exec" writes:

Your phone probably contains banking, payment and personal information that can be remotely stolen via numerous known and unknown bugs in the Android software. This is attractive to criminals.

Vendors (LG, Samsung, Xiaomi, etc.), after selling you their phone, have no incentive to keep your phone's software up to date with Google's fixes. Your Android phone is probably out of date and therefore a gaping security hole through which attackers can steal your stuff from the safety of their own laptops.

In short, your phone could be hacked wide open from afar through a single innocent-looking email, MMS or web-page.

In the end the recommendations are: buy an Iphone, stick to Google phones or install a custom ROM.

Original URL: Android security in 2016 is a mess

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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday December 06 2016, @09:49PM

    by VLM (445) on Tuesday December 06 2016, @09:49PM (#438061)

    stick to Google phones

    There's a popular service option of companies selling phones that use wifi mostly and only switch to cellular when out of range of wifi. I used Republic Wireless for years and never had the slightest problem other than my phones never got any OS upgrades or patches.

    I ended up switching to google fi to get patches. So far so good. I never had a security problem that I know of on the RW phones, but I feel much better on fi.

    With this kind of custom service you can't really slap in a custom ROM in because then it won't do the wifi offloading calls or whatever.

    The google phones are pretty nice hardware and don't come stuffed with with crapware which is also nice.

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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Snow on Tuesday December 06 2016, @10:31PM

    by Snow (1601) on Tuesday December 06 2016, @10:31PM (#438091) Journal

    I have a Blackberry DTEK50 which runs android. Blackberry has provided monthly security updates. The OS also isn't bastardized with touchwiz. I would recommend it, plus it's pretty cheap ($429 CDN, no contract)

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by damnbunni on Wednesday December 07 2016, @07:57AM

      by damnbunni (704) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @07:57AM (#438247) Journal

      I have a Blackberry Priv, which also gets the monthly security patches.

      However, buy them direct from Blackberry. Some of the carriers are terrible about rolling out the update.