Nearly 10 million Android devices have Potentially Harmful Apps says Annual Android security report

According to the latest Android annual security report, more than 735 million devices from over 200 manufacturers have received platform security updates in 2016. The annual Android security report looks at data on Potentially Harmful Apps (PHAs) across Android devices. It also explains how the OS checks apps for unsafe behaviour and provide statistics on the state of software updates for Android devices.

If you are an Android user, you would know that Google releases monthly Android security updates and has been doing so for devices running Android 4.4.4 and up.

While half of devices at the end of 2016 did not receive a platform security update last year, the security team is working to update and streamline the program so that it is easier for manufacturers to push security updates.

The team also revealed that Android’s ‘Verify Apps’ feature conducted 750 million daily checks last year which is a significant update from 450 million the year before. The report also mentioned that the percentage of devices with PHAs went up in 2016 however the overall number was still low.

About 0.71 percent of all Android devices had PHAs installed at the end of 2016, which was 0.5 percent in the beginning of 2015. This means that out of the total 1.4 billion Android users nearly 10 million devices have potentially harmful applications installed.

Publish date: March 23, 2017 1:37 pm| Modified date: March 23, 2017 7:32 pm

WhatsApp will notify you when someone screenshots your chat on next 5th February

 Whats app

California.- Jan Koum, the CEO of WhatsApp announced that the next version of the application is going to include the option of being notified if someone screenshots your conversation. This is an option requested by a lot of users lately, and according to him “after all these years, we’ve reached the conclusion to add it”.

“The functioning is simple, just like the blue tick: You will have the option activated by default. If it’s checked, you’ll be notified if someone screenshots your conversation, and others will be notified if you screenshot theirs. If it’s unchecked, no one gets notified”, stated Koum.

Some users are pissed by this feature, but it’s not that bad at all.

Android is now as secure as the iPhone: Google Security Engineer

Image Credit: Rob Bulmahn

By tech2 News Staff /  02 Nov 2016 , 16:37

If someone tells a security enthusiast that an Android smartphone is more secure than an iPhone, there are chances that he or she may simply laugh it off.

For years, Android phones have been known to be vulnerable when it comes to security compared to the iPhone. But, folks at Android have been trying their best to shed off this tag of being a less secure platform. In a recent interview, talking about the level of security, Adrian Ludwig, the director of security at Android told Motherboard that the Google Pixel and the iPhone are equal when it comes to security.

He said that the security level is ‘nearly identical’ when it comes to ‘almost all threat models’. He further went on to add that Android will soon be better.

“In the long term, the open ecosystem of Android is going to put it in a much better place,” he reportedly added further. But, hasn’t Android been around for almost eight years already? The hiccups of openness and fragmentation continue to exist.

At the O’Reilly Security Conference, Ludwig also spoke about Android’s built-in Safety Net that is capable of scanning 400 million devices per day and also check through 6 billion apps/day. He went on to say that very few Android devices have malware, rather he even said that the number is limited to less than one percent.

While some of the past reports also question the iOS security, Google’s Android  has more to worry about.