Millions Of Android Smartphones Can Be Hacked Due To This Reason: Warning Issued By Google

A recent update by the technology behemoth Google Inc has disclosed a bug in Android devices. As per reports, the bug has been reported in one of the graphics processing units or GPUs inside the Android device.

Millions Of Android Smartphones Can Be Hacked Due To This Reason: Warning Issued By Google

Google’s team of security analysts called the Project Zero team said that it did alert the chip designers about the bug in focus earlier.

The British semiconductor and software design company Arm, on getting intimation from Google’s Project Zero team had fixed the vulnerabilities in the graphics processing units that led Android smartphones prone to getting hacked.

The Project Zero team of Google further said that some top global smartphone manufacturing giants like Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo and Google did not deploy patches to fix the vulnerabilities produced by the bug.

“The vulnerabilities discussed are fixed by the upstream vendor, but at the time of publication, these fixes have not yet made it downstream to affected Android devices (including Pixel, Samsung, Oppo and others). Devices with a Mali GPU are currently vulnerable,” said an analyst of the Project Zero team, Ian Beer.

From June 2022 to July 2022, researchers at the tech major Google discovered and reported five issues to ARM regarding bugs, which the British chipmaker resolved likely between July and August 2022.

The company disclosed them as ‘security issues’ on their Arm Mali Driver Vulnerabilities page (CVE-2022-36449), stated a report. 

However, despite Arm fixing all the issues, Google said that it discovered all of its test devices that used Mali GPU were still vulnerable to the earlier-mentioned issues.

“CVE-2022-36449 is not mentioned in any downstream security bulletins,” Google cited. Companies need to remain vigilant, follow upstream sources closely and do their best to provide complete patches to users as soon as possible, it added.

The South Korean smartphone phone manufacturing giant has revealed that the company’s Snapdragon-powered handsets will not be affected by any of the aforementioned bugs.

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