Several researchers from Chinese giant Tencent and Zhejiang University have discovered a new flaw in our smartphones. Properly used, it would provide access to users’ personal data.
Is your smartphone a potential risk to your bank account? If the manufacturers multiply the security updates on your device, it is very regularly to overcome the flaws likely to suck up your personal data. The latest study from Tencent Labs and the University of Zhejiang, China, reveals a new flaw exploited by hackers that may well worry some users.
This new flaw, unveiled a few weeks ago, primarily concerns Android smartphones (even if some iPhones were still infected during test sessions). Brought to light by Zhejiang University and Tencent Media Labs, it allows the most seasoned hackers to ignore the protections configured on your smartphone. A password ? A diagram? A pin code? This flaw simply allows you to ignore all this in order to directly access your device.
This kind of flaw is not uncommon. But in this specific case, the researchers also noticed that it was possible to bypass the fingerprint lock installed on your smartphone! These experts attempted to replicate the flaw on 10 very popular Android phone models and 10 iPhone models. By injecting very precise code at the very moment when the device scans your fingerprint, it is possible to make your smartphone understand that the latter corresponds to your thumb (or index finger) even if this is not the case. The list of tested smartphones is presented below.
The smartphones tested in this study were all infected and their fingerprint lock ignored. The researchers thus deduced that it was possible to easily override the lock of the selected phones, in particular thanks to operating system versions which were no longer up to date (the most recent Android version which was tested was Android 11 while we are currently on Android 13).
Rest assured, if your smartphone was infected, you would notice it quickly since hackers generally do not wait very long before emptying your personal information and bank accounts. In order to protect yourself from this new flaw, it is always recommended to have the latest updates on your smartphone. You should therefore hurry to install Android 13 or iOS 16 on your device to protect yourself from this flaw and potential others to come.
