Android Users: Your Phone may not be patched afterall

[LSW]

Popular Android Phone Manufacturers Caught Lying About Security Updates

https://thehackernews.com/2018/04/android-security-update.html

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According to a new study, most Android vendors have been lying to users about security updates and telling customers that their smartphones are running the latest updates.

In other words, most smartphone manufacturers including big players like Samsung, Xiaomi, OnePlus, Sony, HTC, LG, and Huawei are not delivering you every critical security patch they're supposed to, a study by Karsten Nohl and Jakob Lell of German security firm Security Research Labs (SRL) revealed.

Nohl and Lell examined the firmware of 1,200 smartphones from over a dozen vendors, for every Android patch released last year, and found that many devices have a "patch gap," leaving parts of the Android ecosystem exposed to hackers.

SRL researchers investigated smartphones that had supposedly received and installed the latest Android updates and released the following breakdown of their findings:

• 0-1 missed patches—Google, Sony, Samsung, Wiko Mobile
• 1-3 missed patches—Xiaomi, OnePlus, Nokia
• 3-4 missed patches—HTC, Huawei, LG, Motorola
• 4+ missed patches—TCL, ZTE

Meanwhile, SRL has developed an app called SnoopSnitch, which you can download for free, to measure the patch level of your own Android smartphone, helping you verify vendor claims about the security of your devices.