We have recently seen that android devices have been infected with a strange kind of virus, stagefright, that takes the device into its grip, rendering it useless to the user. This can be done by sending a simple text message. Google and Samsung have worked hard on this issue and have updated their devices with patches to fend of the virus.
nearly a month after issuing patches, the stagefright make a return like a never ending nightmare for the developers and the manufacturers. The new virus is called as stagefright 2.0 and it can be transmitted into the devices in disguise of mp3 and mp4 file. The worst thing is that the current security patch doesn’t protect against this virus. It has the ability to install malware and security stealing apps without any permission or user knowledge.
When the user previews the stagefright 2.0 which is shown as a mp3 file, the phone instantly gets affected and the user won’t even be able to stop it after that. This virus can be mass deployed to all the android devices via Wi-Fi networks, emails or through a webpage. It is still unknown whether the virus is self-replicating or not.
“Good guys and bad guys alike scour open source projects to find recently patched security issues – patching an open source software project without providing an update puts users at risk, if even only for a matter of weeks. While we have no specific information about what devices will receive fixes, we believe Android devices running Android KitKat 4.4 and later will receive updates,” experts say.
It is very much possible that the infected devices are of very less percentage and your phone is still safe but it isn’t a bad thing to know about this stagefright 2.0 beforehand until google and Samsung write the patch and deploy them to your smartphone.
The concerning thing is that all the devices, irrespective of the version of android they are running can be infected. Since Samsung devices are countless and it takes like years to updates its devices, we do not yet know when the devices will be safeguarded.
