Zero-Day Android Flaws: Cellebrite Tools Used to Hack Student Phones, Amnesty Report Reveals

Zero-Day Android Flaws: Cellebrite Tools Used to Hack Student Phones, Amnesty Report Reveals

Amnesty International said that Google fixed previously unknown flaws in Android that allowed authorities to unlock phones using forensic tools.                                                        Image Credits:Bryce Durbin         On Friday, Amnesty International published a report detailing a chain of three zero-day vulnerabilities developed by phone-unlocking company Cellebrite, which its researchers found after investigating the hack of a student protester’s phone in Serbia. The flaws were found in the core Linux USB kernel, meaning “the vulnerability is not limited to a particular device or vendor and could impact over a billion Android devices,” according to the report. Zero-days are bugs in products that when found are unknown to the software or hardware makers. Zero-days allow criminal and government hackers to break into systems in a way that’s more effective because there is no patch that fixes them yet. In this case, Amnesty said that it first found traces of one of the flaw…