According to a team of researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, there is a new Android exploit that affects all versions of Google mobile operating system.
The name of it? Cloak and Dagger. This particular exploit allows hackers to steal your data through a malicious application that only needs two permissions to break into your system and gain access to passwords and sensitive information. The permissions are these two: BIND ACCESSIBILITY SERVICE (“a11y”) and SYSTEM ALERT WINDOW (“draw on top”).
While in general it is not that easy for users to allow access rights, skilled hackers can trick you and after activating the two permissions they will install the software, steal your data from installed applications and ultimately take full control of your Android device without you even knowing.
Shortly after this revelation, Google immediately took action and published an official statement explaining exactly what it was going to do to prevent such attacks, which appear to affect all Linux-based versions of the Android operating system.
"We have contacted the researchers, whom we sincerely thank for taking care of the safety of our consumers, and we have already updated Google Play Protect to identify and eliminate the problem as soon as possible. We had recently already created new security updates for Android O which will further strengthen our protection against such issues.".
What is certain is that the next Android update will fix several vulnerabilities, but because its release date may be delayed, it would be a good idea to check each application before installing it on our device.
