Google Share Price: Bluebox Uncovers Android Security Flaw

iNVEZZ.com, Thursday July 4th: Researchers at Bluebox Security claim to have uncovered a serious hole in Android’s security model that could affect 99 percent of mobile devices running on Google Inc’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) operating system.

Bluebox Chief Technology Officer Jeff Forristal wrote a post on the blog of the San Francisco mobile security startup yesterday, detailing the nature of the flaw and its implications.

The security hole, Forristal explained, allowed for legitimate mobile applications to be modified to steal data or connect to a botnet. These modifications could be made without breaking the cryptographic signature of the apps, thus allowing the installation to go unnoticed. A botnet is a large number of compromised computers that are used to generate spam, relay viruses or flood a network or Web server with excessive requests to cause it to fail.

!m[Security Hole Leaves 99% of Android Phones Vulnerable to Hacking](/uploads/story/3682/thumbs/pic1_inline.jpg)
“This vulnerability, around at least since the release of Android 1.6, could affect any Android phone released in the last four years — or nearly 900 million devices,” he wrote. Android 1.6, also known as the Donut, was released in 2009.

Forristal said that Bluebox alerted Google about the problem in February. He also said that it was “up to device manufacturers to produce and release firmware updates for mobile devices (and furthermore for users to install these updates)” and that the availability of these updates would vary depending on the individual developers and models.
Google has declined to comment on the matter.
**The Google share price closed at $886.43 in New York on 03.07.2013**