Your Android has MediaTek processor? Be very careful! – Pplware

Android security is a topic much debated, much the fault of frequent discovered flaws and problems that arise.

Usually these failures are in the operating system itself, but recently discovered a new, associated with the processors own devices. Equipment with MediaTek processors are vulnerable and failure is serious!

The Android ecosystem is based on a range of different hardware manufacturers, who are chosen by companies. There is however an area that is limited, even for the market’s fault. Specifically processors and Socs where only 3 or 4 manufacturers dominate.

The MediaTek is one of those manufacturers, but is now a serious problem at hand. A failure discovery leaves them vulnerable Android smartphones equipped with its processors, especially those who are running the 4.4 version of Android.

The flaw was discovered in early January by researcher Justin Case, who detected a software problem that MediaTek uses to control the hardware.

This software has a backdoor that allows any user or malicious application to gain root permissions and from there access to user data or monitor and control these communications.

Once alerted to the problem, MediaTek took almost a month to respond but has already confirmed the existence of this problem and have alerted all manufacturers where their processors were used.

Failure is a debug function designed to test the new equipment, which was not disabled while passing for production and thus followed for customers.

Unfortunately, the fault can not be corrected by MediaTek, having been released a fix by the manufacturers. To be affecting an already old version of Android, the most certain is that this is more a fault that remains unresolved.