What about all the Android junk out there?

Posted Oct 21, 2016 1:44 UTC (Fri) by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
Parent article: More information about Dirty COW (aka CVE-2016-5195)

If that's also exploitable, there is like a billion devices to be taken over. Scary stuff. Anyone knows what is the status there?

What about all the Android junk out there?

Posted Oct 21, 2016 16:11 UTC (Fri) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385) [Link] (3 responses)

Earlier this year there were something like 200 viable Android root exploits commercially available. So...now there's 201?

What about all the Android junk out there?

Posted Oct 21, 2016 18:50 UTC (Fri) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (2 responses)

Wow, that bad, eh? Android sucks so badly when it comes to security, someone at Google should really get sacked for it. The nonsensical idea of throwing these releases/devices over the fence and forgetting about them truly had its days.

What about all the Android junk out there?

Posted Oct 21, 2016 20:07 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

On the upside, it does mean that even locked devices are trivially rootable.

(On the downside... including over the air, by people other than the owner.)

What about all the Android junk out there?

Posted Oct 21, 2016 22:34 UTC (Fri) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link]

Google does scan their app store for suspicious code and block most of it.

In my admittedly limited experience the hacked phones mostly got it through some third-party store or manually installed APK.