Many Android Apps Are Leaking Private Information, Researcher Says (Dark Reading)

[Posted July 20, 2011 by jake]

Dark Reading previews a talk that will be given at the upcoming Black Hat Conference about Android application security issues. The talk is based on a study that looked at Android applications to determine the kinds of security problems that they had. "In the study, Dasient analyzed the live behavior of Android apps to determine their security posture. Of the 10,000 applications evaluated, more than 800 were found to be leaking personal data to an unauthorized server, [Neil] Daswani says. [...] In addition, the researchers found that 11 of the applications were sending potentially unwanted SMS messages out to other smartphones -- the mobile version of spam, Daswani says."

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Posted Jul 21, 2011 7:14 UTC (Thu) by lab (subscriber, #51153) [Link]

Hmm.... seems to include a lot of handwaving, from an anti-malware provider. This seems to be the pattern so far, where Android security-issues stories are concerned. I'm not saying there are _no_ issues, or potential issues, but most of what I've seen so far in the media, comes from the "security industry" wanting to have a piece of the Android cake. Sorry, but I just don't find this terribly serious or credible.

Many Android Apps Are Leaking Private Information, Researcher Says (Dark Reading)

Posted Jul 21, 2011 7:38 UTC (Thu) by ortalo (subscriber, #4654) [Link]

Thanks for your opinion. It saves time.

We should really think into a way of converting this "security tax" often lurking around successfull software into additional budget for (more) security features at the design stage.

Many Android Apps Are Leaking Private Information, Researcher Says (Dark Reading)

Posted Jul 21, 2011 13:50 UTC (Thu) by clugstj (subscriber, #4020) [Link]

Out of 10K crappy apps only 800 of them seem to have security problems? I would call that amazing!