Computer Era

security

A few reasons why you should choose a stock Android phone

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Android is, without doubt, the most popularly used operating system among the smartphone users. It may its easy to use interface or its various features that have made it very much popular among the public. While some mobile manufacturers customize the Android OS to offer their customers with some additional features, Stock Android experience is something which cannot be compared to anything else. Samsung, Xiaomi are some among the many companies that customize the Android OS for their users.

However Stock Android offers the best Android experience to its users, let us go through a few reasons to help you understand the risks and disadvantages of custom Android operating system

  • Android devices are considered less secure compared to that of the iOS devices. The released Android updates are not made available to the users by the mobile manufacturers as they need to customize the Android according to their priorities, this delay in the updates make those devices more vulnerable to malware and there arise some kind of security
  • Custom Android devices don’t receive updates as soon as the stock devices do and this makes the users spend years waiting for the latest Android updates and on the other hand, stock OS users can experience the new Android OS as soon as Google releases it and this allows them to look at their smartphone in a new way
  • While the Samsung and Xiaomi devices come well equipped with lots of unwanted bloatware which creates a lot of clutter, stock devices are completely free of such bloatware
  • With such bloatware in the devices, those custom Android run devices offer poor battery performance and low storage capacity when compared to that of the stock devices.

Stock devices thus can be better than the custom ones in many such ways. You don’t have to compromise on security if you use stock OS.

How to enable and disable Google Play Protect

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Google Play protect  is the feature that has been rolled out recently, Google announced about this feature in May at the Google I/O event. Basically, this feature is an evolution of the company’s Verify Apps feature that has been rolled out to Android few years back.

It is a real time malware scanner which scan each and every application that is installed or about to be installed in your Android device. The company has rolled out this feature in all the devices that are running on Google Play services 11 or above.

Here is how you can check whether you got that feature on your device or not

  • Open the Settings of your device
  • Then tap on Google option
  • Then select security
  • You can then find the Google Play protect option there where you can find the status of the app scan

Enabling and disabling the feature:

As the option is not available to view easily and digged deep inside the settings, even for enabling and disabling the feature also, you need to do the same like above

  • Open device settings
  • Then select Google
  • Then tap on security
  • Then tap on Google Play protect
  • There you can find two options, Scan device for security threats and Improve harmful app detection
  • The first option will be enable by default and you can enable the second option to make sure about the scanning of the installation of third party applications
  • You can disable those options to disable the feature

This is mainly designed for scanning the malware in the Google Playstore and thus helping the users to stay protected and this even warns the users about the harms or threats prone to your Android device from any third party services or installations.

Gmail now warns you before clicking any bad link

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Gmail Security

Now you can feel safer while using Gmail. Suspicious links are circulating through phishing emails in the recent days.

Google took few more security steps to make Gmail safer for the users and introduced two new features which alert us before clicking bad links.

Gmail verify and authenticate senders by following various checks. Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is one of them. Gmail uses SPF to identify and record spam messages. Once Google found any unwanted mail from a suspicious sender, it will warn us by displaying a question mark symbol as the profile photo of the originator.
The second feature Google introduced in Gmail is while accessing the Gmail from a web browser if Google found any risky links in the emails you receive, immediately it displays a warning message. You will get “Warning – visiting this web site may harm your computer!” message on the screen. The warning will show in full page.

In recent days people frequently facing trouble with spam and phishing links. Sometimes they are becoming victims of financial frauds and ransomware attacks. In this context, the latest measures taken by Google will protect the users to a maximum extent.

90 Crores Android phones are at risk with QuadRooter

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QuadRooter

Quadrooter – the latest security bug for Android phones, particularly those which runs on Qualcomm chips is affecting 90 Crores Android phones worldwide.

Security firm Check Point discovered the most recent threat and named it as Quadrooter. It is not a single threat; it is a collection of vulnerabilities found on Android phones.

Does your phone at risk?

If you are using an Android smartphone that runs on Qualcomm Snapdragon or other variant mobile processor then your phone definitely at risk. Most of the Android phones we use have Qualcomm chipsets. So a significant amount of phones worldwide has the issue.

What is the reason behind this?

Similar to Desktops and Laptops, every mobile device must have device drivers to communicate with the different components in the phones we use. Qualcomm chipset provides networking, camera, phone, graphics and memory hardware in the phones we regularly use. The same company develops device drivers to make comfortable for the Android operating system to communicate with the hardware. Check Point found four critical bugs in device drivers Qualcomm developed which allow malicious applications to obtain root access to our Android-based phones.

What are risks

Once a dangerous app got the root access, it can listen to our voice calls, spy on your phone camera, or misuse the financial details stored on your phone. The attacker can do anything on your phone. To protect from the risks these apps cause to our phones, it is a good idea to disable “install from unknown sources” from the Settings menu.

Shocking – 20 Crore alleged Yahoo IDs for sale

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Yahoo mail ID dump

If you still using Yahoo mail ID immediately change your password without neglecting. A notorious hacker named “Peace” selling 20 crore Yahoo mail ID and password dump on the dark web. Yahoo did not respond to this till now.

The hacker is promising the buyers on the accuracy of the dump. He is confidently saying that all the data is 100% working records of the mail IDs. The same hacker earlier sold millions of other social networking accounts like LinkdedIn, MySpace Tumblr, and Twitter.

He is charging three bitcoins means approx. Rs. 1,24,173 for the total dump of 20 Crore Yahoo IDs with passwords.

In a day or two Yahoo may prompt you to change your password to keep you secured. But meanwhile, it is the time to rethink on account security measures we are already maintaining.

Never neglect to account security. Keep strong passwords on every social account, you have. If possible enable two-factor verification of all the crucial services like Gmail, Yahoo, and Facebook. Change your password time to time. All these are basics, but we are not following those basics. That’s why the similar incidents are frequently occurring.