iPhone holes and Android malware – how to keep your phone safe

Recent news stories about mobile phone security – or, more precisely, about mobile phone insecurity – have been more dramatic than usual.

That’s because we’re in what you might call “the month after the week before” – last week being when the annual Black Hat USA conference took place in Las Vegas.

A lot of detailed cybersecurity research gets presented for the first time at that event, so the security stories that emerge after the conference papers have been delivered often dig a lot deeper than usual.

In particular, we heard from two mobile security researchers in Google’s Project Zero team: one looked at the Google Android ecosystem; the other at Apple’s iOS operating system.

Natalie Silvanovich documented a number of zero-day security holes in iOS that crooks could, in theory, trigger remotely just by sending you a message, even if you never got around to opening it.

Maddie Stone described the lamentable state of affairs at some Android phone manufacturers who just weren’t taking security seriously.

Stone described one Android malware sample that infected 21,000,000 devices altogether…

…of which a whopping 7,000,000 were phones delivered with the malware preinstalled, inadvertently bundled in along with the many free apps that some vendors seem to think they can convince us we can’t live without.

But it’s not all doom and gloom, so don’t panic!

Watch now

We recorded this Naked Security Live video to give you and your family some non-technical tips to improve your online safety, whichever type of phone you prefer:

(Watch directly on YouTube if the video won’t play here.)