Severe AirDroid vulnerability exposes users, patch incoming

BY GreenBot Staff

Published 9 Dec 2016

Update, 12/9/16: AirDroid says an update is coming soon to fix the security hole. This article was updated to reflect this.

pular remote management utility AirDroid has attracted tens of millions of users with the lure of sharing the messages files on their phones with their s, but a severe vulnerability had users scared to use the latest version. Now the company says a fix is on the way.

Earlier this month, mobile security firm Zimperium published a report detailing several major vulnerabilities that threaten to hijack your device. The security issue—which existed in previous current versions of the app, according to Zimperium—is related to “insecure communication channels” that “send the same data used to authenticate the device to their statistics server.” That means someone on the same network could use a simple man-in-the-middle attack to intercept the user’s email address password associated with AirDroid. Furthermore, the hacker could then download malicious updates to the app that in turn give them full control over the device.

Zimperium noted at the time that they contacted S Studio about the vulnerability back in May had been in communication with the company through last month’s release of version 4.0. However, the firm advised users to uninstall AirDroid until a fix, now rolling out to the ay Store, was made available.

Betty Chen, chief marketing officer at S Studio, originally told that the company is “indeed working on the solution it should be expected to start to roll out within next two weeks.” She attributed the lack of prior action to “miscommunication” between S Studio Zimperium. Chen followed up yesterday by saying AirDroid has “improved our encryption mechanism as planned fixed the issue regarding the recent concern over AirDroid’s security.”

The impact on you at home:  Android users underst that security vulnerabilities are a fact of life, but generally they originate outside of the ay Store. AirDroid is a popular utility used by as many as 50 million Android users, the developers have an obligation to their users to keep the app as safe secure as possible. Earlier this year, the company quickly patched a similar bug exposed by Check int, it’s good to see S Studio has moved quickly to fix this new one.