Promon, a Norwegian security research team, has discovered a new critical vulnerability that is present on a huge number of Android devices. More than a billion Android smartphones are at stake.
It allows hackers to mask malicious applications to look like any other normal application. This allows tracking the user into giving out dangerous privileges and various important information.
The vulnerability with the number CVE-2020-0096 is called StrandHogg 2.0. At the end of last year, the same team discovered the original vulnerability of StrandHogg. The new StrandHogg 2.0 allows hackers to make more complex attacks.
This critical vulnerability allows spying on the content of Android devices
Last year, Promon experts said that StrandHogg was already used by hackers to steal bank information, other login passwords, as well as to monitor user activity.
It is noted that StrandHogg 2.0 is present on all Android devices, except for the most recent version of the OS – Android 10.
Just for comparison, Google is reporting on its site at least two billion Android users in the world. In May last year, Google announced that around 2.5 billion Android devices were active around the world. Given that as of April 2020, only 16% of users have installed Android 10, we can say with confidence that at least a billion devices are at risk.
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Android 11
In separate news, Google has previously released a teaser video inviting everyone to watch the Android 11 Beta online release show. They usually release the beta version of the new Android systems at the Google I/O conference. However, this year is a little different because of the coronavirus pandemic. The Google I/O 2020 has been canceled thus the only option for the Android 11 beta release is an online conference. This conference will take place on June 3.
Google has advised everyone to watch this conference from home. The event will include news and updates of various official events. Google has also updated the Android 11 release schedule. The new schedule shows that Android 11 will go through 3 Beta releases. There will be a beta release in June, July, and August. The official stable version will arrive around October.
Google has also released Android 11 Developer Preview 4. This preview version doesn’t contain any new features, just some incremental stability and performance updates. The update adds just one major feature that wasn’t present in previous builds. Below you can check the major changes brought by this release.