Is your phone in danger? Threatening malicious text message can hack Android's inner system

With just a simple text message, your phone and all its data may be compromised without you even knowing. The core of this nightmare is at the heart of the operating system itself - Stagefright, an Android code library. Users currently have nothing much to protect their mobile phones and all the attacker needs is the phone number.

MUNTINLUPA, PHILIPPINES (Catholic Online) - "A fully weaponized successful attack could even delete the message before you see it. You will only see the notification. These vulnerabilities are extremely dangerous because they do not require that the victim take any action to be exploited," explained researchers from the security firm Zimperium, as cited from their blog post.

"Unlike spear-phishing, where the victim needs to open a PDF file or a link sent by the attacker, this vulnerability can be triggered while you sleep. Before you wake up, the attacker will remove any signs of the device being compromised and you will continue your day as usual-with a trojaned phone."

According to the firm's vice president for platform research and exploitation, Joshua Drake, there are about 950 million Android devices vulnerable to malicious attacks that bug the system.

The attack doesn't even need the phone user to do anything to complete it. When the attacker sends a specially modified text message, usually in form of a MMS, Stagefright would process and execute the malicious code.

Drake explained that the text message is only one of the techniques, another is by luring the end user into a malicious website executing the same attack. He noted that all phones running on Android versions after, and including the 2.2, especially prior to the 4.3 (Jellybean), are vulnerable, but it is up to the device manufacturers of each to patch the bug.

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