Google recently informed the Android community about the discovery of an unpatched rooting application. The said vulnerability can then activate a malicious application that can infect and compromise a device.
A security advisory was immediately published last March 18 when Google was informed by Zimperium, a mobile security solutions company, that a vulnerability was discovered on a Nexus 5 smartphone. The search engine giant's security team immediately got to work and confirmed that the said exploit can infect and take advantage of Nexus 5 and Nexus 6 devices.
"Google has become aware of a rooting application using an unpatched local elevation of privilege vulnerability in the kernel on some Android devices (CVE-2015-1805). For this application to affect a device, the user must first install it. We already blocked installation of rooting applications that use this vulnerability — both within Google Play and outside of Google Play — using Verify Apps, and have updated our systems to detect applications that use this specific vulnerability."
Google added that in a worst-case scenario, if the malicious code has taken root in the Android operating system, the only way to fix it is to do a re-flashing.
However, the said vulnerability will not easily be installed in or get into an Android device. For those users who normally get their downloads and applications from Google Play and partners, they are already protected with the multiple layers of security. Verify Apps has already been updated and blocks applications that have some rooting involved. Also, Android devices carrying the 3.18 Linux kernel version or higher will not be affected by the issue.
Unfortunately, there are users who are more daring when it comes to downloading apps and other things. They would often try other channels, and this is where the trouble might start.
Google encourages Android users to accept the soon-to-be-released update when they are prompted to.
