Weekly News about Technology

Android apps 'leak' personal details

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20025973

Are Androids really safe to use ?

Scientists tested 13,500 Android apps and found almost 8% failed to protect bank account and social media logins.

These apps failed to implement standard scrambling systems, allowing "man-in-the-middle" attacks to reveal data that passes back and forth when devices communicate with websites.

The researchers were able to:

• capture login details for online bank accounts, email services, social media sites and corporate networks
• disable security programs or fool them into labelling secure apps as infected
• inject computer code into the data stream that made apps carry out specific commands

An attacker could even re-direct a request to transfer funds, while making it look to the app user like the transaction was proceeding unchanged.

Some of the apps tested had been downloaded millions of times, the researchers said.

And a follow-up survey of 754 people suggests users could struggle to spot when they were at risk.

In my opinion, I personally think that Androids are really unsafe to use when it comes to protecting peoples personal details, especially that only 8 % out of 13,500 phones that were being tested failed to protect the bank details. If you use an android phone, you have to extra careful at all times so that people don't steal your personal data and it shouldn't  be like this.