Posted on Tuesday, March 25 2014 @ 11:34 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Security researchers discovered a memory corruption bug in Android that could be exploited to brick smartphones and tablets. There's no evidence that attackers are actively exploiting this bug but up to 80 percent of all Android devices could be vulnerable.
"We believe that this vulnerability may be used by cybercriminals to do some substantial damage on Android smartphones and tablets, which include bricking a device, or rendering it unusable in any way," Trend Micro mobile threat analyst Veo Zhang wrote in a blog post. "In this context, the device is bricked as it is trapped in an endless reboot."
According to Trend Micro, the vulnerability means hackers could build a Trojanised application to target devices running Android versions 4.0 and above, which if the latest figures at the Android Developer forum are anything to go by, could affect up to 80 percent of all active Google smartphones and tablets.
Source: The Inquirer
