US researchers have discovered a large number of vulnerabilities in smartphones. Malware and backdoors are often pre-installed at the root level, and there is nothing a regular user can do about it.
A man holding a smartphone with google pay functionality.
Most people are aware that their cellphone may have certain vulnerabilities and that they should be careful about the settings they choose, cautious when using the device to send and receive sensitive data and wary about what kind of apps to install.
But would you have imagined that a brand-new mobile phone straight from the factory comes with pre-installed spyware? The phone may have an invisible app that manages to obtain elevated admin privileges and do things that you as a user can hardly detect and cannot disable.
That app may even send out data packages to some remote server at night when you as the owner are sleeping and your cellphone is turned off.
That’s not fiction, say Angelos Stavrou and Ryan Johnson from the US company Kryptowire.
The cybersecurity experts talked about the vulnerabilities at the Cirosec IT-Defense Conference in Bonn in February.
