A flaw in Google's Android Operating System makes over 95 percent of Android users vulnerable to hackers. The flaw uses a text message to penetrate the system, and users still get infected even when the message is not opened.
Joshua Drake of Zimperium zLabs discovered the security flaw back in April. He immediately informed the maker of the OS - Google, according to Huffington Post.
"The security of Android users is extremely important to us and so we responded quickly and patches have already been provided to partners that can be applied to any device," a Google spokesperson told NBC News in a statement.
The weaknesses reside in "Stagefright," a media playback tool in Android. Drake explained that the security breach is a remote code execution bug, allowing hackers to infiltrate the system They are all "remote code execution" bugs, allowing malicious hackers to infiltrate the devices and then extract private data - all it takes is a phone number to send the bug to. From there, they could send an exploit packaged in a Stagefright multimedia message (MMS), which would let them write code to the device and steal data from sections of the phone that can be reached with Stagefright's permissions, Forbes reports.
This means that the bug can snoop in on audio, video and photo data on the Android smartphone.
Android OS is used by phones built by different manufacturers, making the update process against the breach more difficult for Android to respond to.
