Android 16 will warn if you are connected to a fake ‘Stingray' cell tower

Indian Express

10 hours ago

From banking details to pictures of friends and family, smartphones are a treasure trove of personal information. And while you can take all the precautionary measures to keep sensitive data safe, some attacks are very hard to protect against.
One of these is the infamous stingray attack, which intercepts all your phone calls and SMSes. Often used by surveillance agencies around the world, the attack works by tricking your smartphone into connecting to a fake cell tower. However, a new feature coming with Android 16 might be able to warn you if you are being snooped on.
With Android 16, Google is reintroducing the 'mobile network security' settings page as part of the Safety Center, which can be accessed by heading over to the Security & privacy tab in the Settings app.
Here, you will see two subsections – 'Notifications', which features a toggle named 'Network notifications', enabling which will allow Android to warn if your phone connects to any unencrypted network or when it asks about your phone's unique identifiers. However, this toggle is disabled by default. When enabled, Android will display a message in the notification panel as well as the Safety Center whenever your phone switches from an encrypted to an unencrypted network or vice versa.
The second subsection – called '2G network protection' is a toggle that lets you disable or enable the phone's 2G connectivity. It is also disabled by default.
One thing to note here is that the feature might only be available with devices that come with Android 16 out of the box, as these devices will support Android's Radio HAL 3.0 drivers. However, the 'Mobile network security' page will only be visible when your device supports both of these features, which is why it is missing from any of the current Pixel devices running Android 16.
But a Google policy that allows smartphone manufacturers to decide the hardware requirements at launch might mean that we won't be seeing the feature on any of the current devices.
Also, this isn't the first time Google has tried to block Stingray attacks. On Android 15, the operating system will warn users when a network asks for a device's unique identifiers, like the IMEI number. A few years ago, when the tech giant rolled out Android 12, it added an option that allowed users to disable 2G connectivity.