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Android -  a widely used Smartphone platform offered by Google is once again suspected to affect its users with malicious software that puts their android devices at risk. This time the vulnerabilities occur in the way Android handle the updates to add new flavors to your device. Researchers from Indiana University and Microsoft have discovered [ Paper PDF ] a new set of Android vulnerabilities that is capable to carry out privilege escalation attacks because of the weakness in its Package Management Service (PMS) that puts more than one billion Android devices at risk. The researchers dubbed the new set of security-critical vulnerabilities as Pileup flaws which is a short for privilege escalation through updating, that waylays inside the Android PMS and intensifies the permissions offered to malicious apps whenever an android update occurs, without informing users. The research was carried out by Indiana University Bloomington researchers, Luyi Xing, Xiaorui Pan, Ka

Are you looking for methods on how to run two WhatsApp accounts in one phone, or how to use 2 WhatsApp in 1 phone? In this tutorial, we have shared various techniques that allow mobile users to run multiple or dual WhatsApp accounts in one single phone. WhatsApp is one of the most popular and commonly used Instant messaging apps these days, and due to its simplicity and easy-to-use interface, users are able to use it without any hassle. WhatsApp lets its users send and receive messages that are end-to-end encrypted so that only you and the person you're communicating with can read the content of the message, and nobody in between, not even WhatsApp. Each and everything on WhatsApp comes quite handy, but what is the most disturbing part that you come across? For me it is... How to install 2 WhatsApp accounts in 1 Android smartphone? If you have a dual SIM smartphone, you might be willing to enjoy two separate WhatsApp accounts for your two different phone number. Is

Over the past two years, a shocking  51% of organizations surveyed in a leading industry report have been compromised by a cyberattack.  Yes, over half.  And this, in a world where enterprises deploy  an average of 53 different security solutions  to safeguard their digital domain.  Alarming? Absolutely. A recent survey of CISOs and CIOs, commissioned by Pentera and conducted by Global Surveyz Research, offers a quantifiable glimpse into this evolving battlefield, revealing a stark contrast between the growing risks and the tightening budget constraints under which cybersecurity professionals operate. With this report, Pentera has once again taken a magnifying glass to the state of pentesting to release its annual report about today's pentesting practices. Engaging with 450 security executives from North America, LATAM, APAC, and EMEA—all in VP or C-level positions at organizations with over 1,000 employees—the report paints a current picture of modern security validation prac

There's both good news and bad news for Fortnite game lovers. Fortnite, one of the most popular games in the world right now, is coming to Android devices very soon, but players would not be able to download Fortnite APK from the Google Play Store. Instead, Epic Games software development company has confirmed the Fortnite APK for Android will be available for download exclusively only through its official website, bypassing the Google Play Store. Why Fortnite for Android Bypassing Google Play Store? Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney cites two main reasons for this decision. First, offering Fortnite APK downloads directly from its official website will allow the company to "have a direct relationship" with its consumers. Second, since Google takes a 30 percent cut of revenue each time a user makes an in-app purchase through its Play Store, the decision will allow the company to save millions. This should not be shocking as Fortnite on iOS made $15 million in j

After a long wait and months of beta testing, Google last week finally released Android 11 , the latest version of the Android mobile operating system—with features offering billions of its users more control over their data security and privacy. Android security is always a hot topic and almost always for the wrong reason, including Google's failure to prevent malicious apps from being distributed through the Play Store, over-claim of permissions by apps, and privacy leakages. Though most of such issues can be avoided as long as users take advantage of already available features and a little common sense, most users are still not aware of or following basic security practices. According to Google's latest announcement, the latest Android 11 OS includes a few new built-in measures designed to keep users' data secure by default, increase transparency, and offer better control. Instead of diving deep into smaller or more extensive changes, we have summarized some critica

It seems like there isn't any end to Android security flaws. After the discovery of the Stagefright vulnerability that allowed hackers to infect Millions of Android devices with just a maliciously-crafted message… Researchers have now warned of another critical security hole in Google's Android mobile operating system platform that impacts over 55 percent of all Android users . Security researchers at IBM have discovered a new privilege escalation vulnerability in the Android platform that could allow " a malicious app with no privileges the ability to become a 'super app' and help the cybercriminals own the device. " Dubbed the Android serialization vulnerability, assigned CVE-2015-3825 , affects Android versions 4.3 and above, including the latest build of Android M. The vulnerability resides in a component of Android's platform called OpenSSLX509Certificate , which can be exploited by an Android app to compromise the system_server process and gain powerful syste

A critical code-execution vulnerability almost affecting everyone those are not running the most updated version of Google Android , i.e. Android version 4.4 also known as KitKat. After nine months of vulnerability disclosure to the Android security team, researchers of the Application Security team at IBM have finally revealed all the possible details of a serious code-execution vulnerability that still affects the Android devices running versions 4.3 and earlier, which could allow attackers to exfiltrate sensitive information from the vulnerable devices. " Considering Android's fragmented nature and the fact that this was a code-execution vulnerability, we decided to wait a bit with the public disclosure ," said Roee Hay, a security research group leader at IBM. The researchers found the stack buffer overflow vulnerability that resides in the Android's KeyStore storage service, which according to the Android developers' website is the service code running in Androi

Own an Android phone? Beware, Your Android smartphones can be hacked by just a malformed text message. Security researchers have found that 95% of Android devices running version 2.2 to 5.1 of operating system, which includes Lollipop and KitKat, are vulnerable to a security bug, affecting more than 950 Million Android smartphones and tablets. Almost all Android smart devices available today are open to attack that could allow hackers to access the vulnerable device without the owners being aware of it, according to Joshua Drake, vice president of platform research and exploitation at security firm Zimperium. The vulnerability actually resides in a core Android component called " Stagefright ," a multimedia playback library used by Android to process, record and play multimedia files such as PDFs. A Text Message Received...Your Game is Over The sad news for most of the Android users is that the fix will not help Millions of Android users that owned o

When it comes to security updates, Android is a real mess. Even after Google timely rolls out security patches for its Android platform, a major part of the Android ecosystem remains exposed to hackers because device manufacturers do not deliver patches regularly and on a timely basis to their customers. To deal with this issue, Google at its I/O Developer Conference May 2018 revealed the company's plan to update its OEM agreements that would require Android device manufacturers to roll out at least security updates regularly. Now, a leaked, unverified copy of a new contract between Google and OEMs obtained by The Verge reveals some terms of the agreement that device manufacturers have to comply with or otherwise they have to lose their Google certification for upcoming Android devices. Google's New Terms for Android Security Updates According to the leaked contract, Android OEMs will now be required to regularly roll out security updates for popular devices—lau

Millions of Android devices are at serious risk of a newly disclosed critical vulnerability that allows attackers to secretly overwrite legitimate applications installed on your smartphone with their malicious versions. Dubbed Janus , the vulnerability allows attackers to modify the code of Android apps without affecting their signature verification certificates, eventually allowing them to distribute malicious update for the legitimate apps, which looks and works same as the original apps. The vulnerability ( CVE-2017-13156 ) was discovered and reported to Google by security researchers from mobile security firm GuardSquare this summer and has been patched by Google, among four dozen vulnerabilities, as part of its December Android Security Bulletin . However, the worrisome part is that majority of Android users would not receive these patches for next few month, until their device manufacturers (OEMs) release custom updates for them, apparently leaving a large number of sma

A Serious vulnerability has been discovered in the Web browser installed by default on a large number (Approximately 70%) of Android devices, that could allow an attacker to hijack users' open websites, and there is now a Metasploit module available to easily exploit this dangerous flaw. The exploit targets vulnerability ( CVE-2014-6041 ) in Android versions 4.2.1 and all older versions and was first disclosed right at the start of September by an independent security researcher Rafay Baloch, but there has not been much public discussion on it. The Android bug has been called a " privacy disaster " by Tod Beardsley, a developer for the Metasploit security toolkit, and in order to explain you why, he has promised to post a video that is " sufficiently shocking ." " By malforming a javascript: URL handler with a prepended null byte, the AOSP, or Android Open Source Platform (AOSP) Browser) fails to enforce the Same-Origin Policy (SOP) browser secur

The search engine giant Google will soon come up with its next version of Android operating system, dubbed as Android L , with full-disk encryption enabled by default, Google confirmed Thursday. This will be for the first time that Google's Android OS will be encrypting your information, preventing both hackers and law enforcement agencies from gaining access to users' personal and highly sensitive data on their devices running the Android operating system. While Android has been offering data encryption options for some Android devices since 2011. However the options are not enabled by default, so users have had to activate the functionality manually. But Android L will have new activation procedures that will encrypt data automatically. Although Google is yet to provide more details about Android L, which is set to be released next month. But the move by the web giant will surely provide an extra layer of security on the personal data that users typically have on t

A security weakness in Android mobile operating system versions below 5.0 that puts potentially every Android device at risk for privilege escalation attacks, has been patched in  Android 5.0 Lollipop  – the latest version of the mobile operating system. The security vulnerability ( CVE-2014-7911 ), discovered by a security researcher named Jann Horn , could allow any potential attacker to bypass the Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) defense and execute arbitrary code of their choice on a target device under certain circumstances. ASLR is a technique involved in protection from buffer overflow attacks. The flaw resides in java.io.ObjectInputStream , which fails to check whether an Object that is being deserialized is actually a serializable object. The vulnerability was reported by the researcher to Google security team earlier this year. According to the security researcher, android apps can communicate with system_service, which runs under admin privileges

Famous Android developer Chainfire released an experimental hack with a new app, called " Suhide ," that allows users to hide the root status of their rooted Android devices on an app-by-app basis. Rooting your Android device can bring a lot of benefits by giving you access to a wide variety of apps and deeper access to the Android system...But at what cost? One of the major drawbacks of rooting your device is losing access to certain apps, which includes banking, payment and corporate security apps that work with financial and confidential data, such as your bank details. Such apps don't work on rooted devices. A great example for this is Google's Android Pay . Since its launch, developers has been working hard to get Android Pay working for rooted devices, but unfortunately, they have not gotten much success. But Why Rooted Devices? It's because Google cares about your security. SafetyNet — That's How Google Detects Tampered Devices Google

No, it's not Nutella. Google has finally announced the official name of the latest version of its Android mobile software, codenamed Android N: " Nougat ." Yes, the next version of sugary snack-themed Android and the successor to Android Marshmallow will now be known as Android Nougat, the company revealed on Snapchat and Twitter. The announcement comes days after Google set up a website for users to submit suggestions for the name of Android N . Android has maintained its tradition of naming its Android mobile operating system by the names of alphabetically-ordered sugary delights starting from Android Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean, KitKat, Lollipop, and Marshmallow . The final release of Android Nougat is still in beta and due later this summer. The good news is that the Google Android team has brought several meaningful features to your smartphone and tablet with the release of Android Nougat. Andro

Security Enhanced (SE) Android Released by National Security Agency (NSA) The National Security Agency (NSA) releases the first version of Android Security Enhanced . The system is designed to minimize the impact of security holes on Android . SE Android project is enabling the use of SELinux in Android in order to limit the damage that can be done by flawed or malicious apps and in order to enforce separation guarantees between apps. However, the scope of the SE Android project is not limited to SELinux.  How can SELinux help Android? Confine privileged daemons. Protect them from misuse. Limit the damage that can be done via them. Sandbox and isolate apps. Strongly separate apps from each other and from the system. Prevent privilege escalation by apps. Provide centralized, analyzable policy. Distinctive features SE Android: Per-file security labeling support for yaffs2, Filesystem images (yaffs2 and ext4) labeled at build time, Kernel permission checks controlling B

Poor Android users are facing a terrible, horrible, and awful week. Few days ago, Trend Micro security researchers uncovered a Android crashing vulnerability in the widely used mobile operating system, impacting the majority of Android devices in use. The report follows another significant Stagefright vulnerability that was revealed by separate researchers, who warned that nearly 950 Million Android phones can be hijacked by sending a simple text message or via malicious Android app or specially crafted web pages. EXPLOIT TO TRAP ANDROID DEVICES IN ENDLESS REBOOTS Now, the security researchers have discovered a dangerous security bug in the Android operating system that they claim can "brick" your phone, making it unresponsive and completely useless. The new vulnerability, CVE-2015-3823 , can be exploited by potential hackers to cause your Android device to endless Reboot, and is similar to the Stagefright bug in that the flaw exists in the 'media