Smartphone users think that they can keep their handsets safe from intrusions by setting up passwords for their lockscreens. While doing this may indeed help one from keeping other people from meddling with his smartphone, some tricks can still be used to crack pass codes for the devices. And such has recently been found an issue among majority of the Android phones. But is it really a great cause for concern?
A BBC report claims that researchers from the University of Texas discovered that the lockscreen can be unlocked by using a simple hack. This involves typing in more characters than the pass code, requiring more than seven times and causing the phone to crash. As a result, the screen will then be unlocked. Thus, the hack does not work for PIN and pattern protected lockscreens.
The said PIN and pattern based lockscreen settings do not allow users to key in or copy and paste letters repeatedly -- leaving no opportunity for the smartphone to crash. And though it seems to have some sort of concern on such flaw affecting 21 percent of Android devices with the affected operating system, a patch has already been issued for the Nexus smartphone to fix it. And according to Extreme Tech, other Android phones such as LG and Samsung, are not even vulnerable, in the first place.
Tech writer Ryan Whitman of Extreme Tech has claimed to test the said Android brands for the flaw and also concluded that the flaw has already been fixed for the latest models. Whitman tested the Samsung Galaxy S6, Moto G 2015 and LG G4. "You can't paste into the password field at all. So what does this mean? Virtually, every device with this bug has been fixed, and there's no need to panic," he added.
John Gordon of University of Texas in Austin reported the said flaw to Google. Consequently, Gordon received a $500 reward for reporting the glitch to the tech giant. The American-based IT search giant has classified the glitch as merely one of the moderate severities.
