Android has its head in the sand with AbstractEmu malware rooting phones A new and dangerous form of malware for rooting Android phones has been spotted in 19 apps on Google's Play store, as well as in several in the Amazon Appstore, the Samsung Galaxy Store, and other third-party sites. Dubbed AbstractEmu by bug-hunters at Lookout, who first spotted the code, the malware would give full access to …
> "It's like going into baseball's World Series with only six players on the field when the other team has all nine."
Why, does cybersecurity also claim to be a world competition whle only including teams from the USA, Canada and that one from Japan?
Yanks really need to stop using their provincial sports as metaphors because the rest of the world don't understand them. A presenter at GitHub Universe last week made a basketball analogy which made no sense to the vast majority of people watching and greatly detracted from the technical content of his talk.
> The malware uses already-patched flaws in Android, so update the OS as soon as possible buy a new phone as soon as possible
Here, fixed it for you.
How can anybody even suggest users should update when they know perfectly this is impossible because it depends entirely on the manufacturer's marketing strategy, which is always geared towards forcing you to buy a new phone every year (at least).
(And don't even bother with the "flash your own" malarkey, that's only possible for a limited few, and even then, not for every phone.)
How can anybody even suggest users should update when they know perfectly this is impossible because it depends entirely on the manufacturer's marketing strategy, which is always geared towards forcing you to buy a new phone every year (at least).
Hear! Hear!
Even Android One only offers security upgrades for a fixed, small, number of years. We really need to stop manufacturers from generating landfill phones and require them to provide support for the lifetime of the device.
> stop manufacturers from generating landfill phones and require them to provide support for the lifetime of the device
Put that with with world peace and eradicating poverty, in the box with the "Extremely unlikely, still would be nice if it happened" sticker.
Product lifetime has steadily gone down since the industrial revolution, to a point nowadays products have to be specially engineered to fail faster...
I was about to make exactly the same point as this. I've just stopped using a perfectly viable piece of hardware because it no longer receives updates. I don't know who downvoted your eminently sensible comment. We have world leaders in Glasgow trying to fix global warming, but apparently even relatively simple problems like "don't force people to throw their phones away every two or three years" are insoluble.
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