In a recent study at the University of Cambridge, the researchers found 87% of all android devices are currently vulnerable to security breaches. Google, in the meantime announced security updates for its Nexus; however, that unfortunately will not repair or secure any other Android device’s security vulnerabilities. The research team revealed that the greater part of Android phones currently in use and on the market could be hacked via a simple MMS or multimedia file. The team’s research uncovered exactly how far Android’s ecosystem has fallen behind in relation to dealing with security issues and this comes despite all recent promises to further improve security via its monthly patches.
Nearly all Android platformed handsets remain open to security attacks, due to all handset manufacturers’ failure to deliver on its promised security updates in a timely fashion. The above is a summary of the conclusions discovered by the Cambridge University research team in their quest to identify and quantify the exact current level of security risk in Android mobile devices.
In order to do an aggregation and compilation of its data the research group uploaded a Data Analyser app to Google’s Play Store. It provided the capability to collect data from a vast number of participants, while at the same time ensuring Android smart devices that did not run Google Play Services, such as those currently targeted at newly emerging markets, were excluded from the final result calculation.
Resultantly the researchers acquired data from approximately 20,000 individual android devices, with the greater part being from major hardware suppliers such as HTC, LTG, Motorola, and Samsung, even currently uses free to download install and run this app for themselves to contribute by providing more data for the team to analyse.
The research remains current and ongoing, and benefits from partial Google funding. Part of the research was to ascertain the reaction time from all major hardware manufacturers were in applying the latest available security update patches to their own branded devices. The full results reveal a truly abhorrent picture, the research was conducted after the Stagefright vulnerability revealed the speed at which a single security issue could be utilised to become a threat to the complete Android community.
In part the problem exists due to the fact that Android updates bottleneck at their manufacturers that need to integrate the Google security patch into their proprietary versions of the OS before it can be distributed to each brand’s devices. In contrast, date Apple releases its updates is the date and minute its devices are secured; Android carrier branded devices experience even further delays since each carrier tests these updates before releasing them to their users. Fortunately for Nexus users, in this scenario they are at the top of the Android food chain since they receive updates directly from Google on the date of its first release.
In summation, not a single device aside from Nexus managed to score above 5/10 rating.