New Android, iPhone Warning—Do Not Make This 1 Change Hackers Love
Don't root or jailbreak your smartphone, security researchers have warned.
Let's face it: cybercriminals, scammers and hackers hardly need any help when it comes to attacking your smartphone. The facts speak for themselves, with hundreds of dangerous apps finding their way into the Google Play Store, smartphone users deploying the same password across multiple accounts, and deepfake attacks rampant. Now, smartphone threat intelligence experts have warned that users of both Android and iOS devices are doing one thing, without any need for malicious coercion, that makes their smartphones 250 times more likely to be compromised by hackers. Here's what you need to know and what you shouldn't do.
I have a total of three smartphones in everyday use here: two iPhones and an Android. All are what are known as plain vanilla devices, running stock versions of the Android and iOS operating systems. This might come as a surprise to those who know me and my love for hacking things. You might think I would have rooted the Android and jailbroken at least one of the iPhones. Truth be told, I have. What I haven't done is take that action on the smartphones that are used every day in my personal and business life, I only root devices that don't carry personal and valuable data. And there's a very good security reason for that, as a new report from Zimperium has just confirmed.
'As cybercriminals have moved to a mobile-first attack strategy, rooting and jailbreaking of mobile devices, originally popular for customization, continues to be a very powerful attack vector,' Ignacio Montamat, a threat analyst for the zLabs team at Zimperium, said.
Rooting and jailbreaking involve gaining the deepest access to the operating system, in essence allowing the user to make changes to system files and install pretty much anything they like.
To underscore just how dangerous making the decision to root your Android or jailbreak your iPhone can be, Zimperium highlighted recent data from its own zLabs analysis that showed that rooting devices leads to 3.5 times as many malware attacks, which system compromise by hackers rose by an incredible 250 times.
"Unfortunately, when a device is jailbroken or rooted, the security that is put in place by default is bypassed,' Erich Kron, a security awareness advocate at KnowBe4, warned, 'and the user of the device is now running everything at an admin permission level.' If you really need to be told how this helps the hackers, Kron explained that as built-in operating system security controls often restrict unknown apps from running, 'you can't simply restore the device to a secure state after installing the application.' This means, dear reader, that the security bypass remains in place in most situations and makes it easier for hackers to attack. 'People who are interested in rooting or jailbreaking devices need to be very aware of the additional risk it puts them at,' Kron concluded, 'especially if this is a device being used on a daily basis.'
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