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Wednesday, March 11, 2020

6 Million Android Phones Hacked? Really?

It was recently in the news that "6 million Android phones are at risk of being hacked." Then if you dig deeper it turns out these are the older devices in poorer countries with versions of the Android OS which Google has stopped supporting. Let me explain what "not supported" means. It means if the OS developer finds a bug or exploit (a vulnerability a hacker can exploit) they are not legally obligated to push a fix or security update. So, yes, an unsupported OS is a hacker's paradise, but that's not news, every tech person already knows that. A lot of people say a lot of things are fake news these days, but that one might really actually deserve to be called fake news. It would be like saying that people have invented this great thing called the wheel and that's worth a headline. Wheels are great, but that's not news.