Android has a new very important alert released today due to a problem that affects many phone models, 9 zero-day vulnerabilities being discovered in the operating system. Zero-day vulnerabilities are those unknown to Google until the moment of disclosure, and this is related to the way VoIP technology is implemented in the latest versions of the Android operating system.
Android can have the VoIP functionality of phones controlled to reject calls, to find out the identity of the caller, or worse, to run malicious code without the victim knowing what is happening. Those who discovered this very serious problem disclosed it to the Google company, which of course paid them a substantial amount of money to help make the Android operating system much safer than before.
ALERT for Android, New SERIOUS PROBLEM for Phones
Android has exploited these vulnerabilities through a method that until now has not been used for attacks of this kind, and all versions from 7.0 to 9.0 would be affected by its existence. The problem is considered very serious by the experts who discovered it, but apparently also by those from Google, who are now preparing a new patch for Android that would bring the affected phones back to safety.
“Chinese researchers have discovered no less than nine zero-day vulnerabilities in the way Android handles VoIP in its latest versions. They found that the issues were present from Android 7.0 to the latest 9.0, two-thirds of which could be exploited by a network adversary due to incompatible processing between VoIP and PSTN calls.”
Android is installed in versions 7.0 - 9.0 in over 1 billion terminals worldwide at the moment, so an extremely large number of people are at risk due to these very serious vulnerabilities. Although the vulnerabilities have an impact on a very large number of phones with the Android operating system, for the time being it is not very clear what kind of malicious code can be run thanks to them, this is practically the biggest part of the problem.
Just the other day, Android had another very big security problem revealed by researchers, and now we are talking about another one, and all because it seems that no operating system can be completely secured.
