Compromising your phones has become quite an easy task for the hackers these days as it is convenient for them to do so without much hard work .There are numerous ways already available like the hackers can change passwords and get access to confidential corporate and private data on your phone or better yet they can either install malicious code on your phone that allows them to read your messages, access your photos or could even turn on your microphone.
In other words, once hackers access your device,
they can easily use your microphone or camera to record you, and thanks to GPS,
they’ll even get to know your location.
In case of companies that make operating systems
(OS) for mobile phones, they are used to plugging known vulnerabilities and
loopholes by periodically updating their operating systems and release newer
versions of it by even issuing security patches.
But in the case of Android, there exists a unique
problem. Android being a foundational OS releases an update or a security patch
and it’s unclear who is responsible for updating the OS that’s actually running
on the device.
There are hundreds of companies that are currently
making Android based devices and selling more than 60,000 models worldwide.
It’s a complex ecosystem, with no one quite tracking the updates and
vulnerabilities.
A third of the Android phones in India are running a
version of the OS released in March 2015 or before. This leaves now some 300
million smart phone users in India potentially vulnerable.
Nobody presently knows how they are utilizing the
internet and what applications are being installed on these devices. They are
additionally liable to be less attentive about imparting information to
application developers. Most terms and conditions that users consent to have a
tendency to be in English. And that in itself is reasonable enough for assuming
that numerous Indian mobile users are consenting to things without quite
understanding what they are consenting to.
“It is relatively harder to install malware on
Apple’s iPhones as to install a hacking app on an iPhone, you need the unique
device identifier — a sequence of 40 letters and numbers, which can only be
accessed by connecting the phone to a computer via Apple’s iTunes software. It
is far easier however to install an app from an unknown source on an Android
phone than on an iPhone,”
According to data aggregated by Lucideus, Android
(all versions combined) has 1,855 known vulnerabilities, compared with 1,495
for iOS.
The Outdated privacy laws in India add to the troubles
of mobile phone users. Shiv Putcha, founder of telecom consultancy Mandala
Insights says..
“In India, the
regulations are weak at best, you don’t have a privacy law, no regulations
around data storage or access to private data. If they (mobile phone makers and
service providers) aren’t storing data here, how can we be sure how secure our
data is?”
Nevertheless the government though did respond to
this issue by highlighting the need for a strong data protection law, along the
lines of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU, and has even set
up a committee to look into it.
Although according to Google, in 2017, India still
ranks third in the highest percentage of phones with potentially harmful
applications (PHAs) among the major Android markets, with 1% of the total
Android phones in the country affected, though the figure had dropped by a
third from 2016 but Google still says that devices that install apps from
outside the Google Play app store are nine times more likely to have PHAs.
